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1 



Advent of Empire 



BY / 

MORRISON I. SWIFT 



LOS ANGELES, CAL. 

THE RONBROKE PRESS 

19d0 



COPYRIGHT I900, BY 
MORRISON I. SWIFT 



TWO COPIES ftJ£CeiV£iD, 



Library of Congr9t% <'li'A 

Office of tbe 'F3^ ^ 

MAY 2 4 1900 . , ^^, 

Register of Copyrlgkfft '^ jy 

62696 

SECOND COPY. 



CONTENTS 



1. The Gun is God. 

2^ ^TJhue.^P^th^ ,t9 Slavery.. 

3. Imperial Sam. 

4. The Greatest Thing is Love. 

5. Go Die for the President King. 

6. American Love. 

7. Butcher McKinley. 

8. Cradle Magic of the Millionaire. 

9. Might and Right. 

10. Imperial England, with Thoughts on Imperial 

America. 

11. Anglo-Saxon Union. 

12. John Bullet. 

13. Possessional (A Victorious Ode). 

14. The Cosmopolitan Business Man's Creed. 

15. Prayer of the Rich. 

16. The Free American Workingman. 

17. Equality. 

18. The Primitive Races Shall Be Cultured. 

19. Tweedle de Kipling. 

20. Bulldog of Liberty. 

21. John Rockefeller. 

22. The Brothers. 

23. I Am a Just God. 

24. Rebels. 

25. Man. 

26. Tyrants of the Republic. 

27. Who Save the World. 

28. The Workingman's Opportunity. 

29. This Dying Country. 

30. McKinley's Cabinet Meeting. 

31. Chains of Republican Empire. 

32 There is Still Health in the Desert. 



1 



Advent of Empire 



The Gun is God 

The God of the world of the haughty moderns. 
The holy Christ of atoned earth's saints, 
Is the ardent gun that belches killing, 
Exploding shell in a thousand brains. 

Love is cold as the glacial ice 
Of the ages that polished the anchored rocks; 
Heart is dead as the plague-marred corpse, 
Or mummy parched at the source of Time. 

Hate is Lord of the white man's virtues, 
Death the sceptre and crown thereof; 
Beg for life, ye weak, and listen: 
Swish of Bword is Law of Love. 



The Path to Slavery 

In this somber moment craven 
We are drifting to our fate, 
While the seeds of ancient leaven 
Blossom to the glare of hate. 
We who were a noble nation, 
Born upon a purer plane 
Than the ruffians of creation, 
Whom we imitate for gain! 
Vaunting wildly mad excuses, 
Maniacal rage for war; 
Lifting high the old abuses 
On the clotted base of gore. 
Trade debauches with a war force 
That will strike our freedom low! 
Harnessing us in a war course 
Homeward sure to turn the blow! 

For the solemn law is written 
On the burning mist of time — 
'By your hand you shall be smitten, 
You shall die of greedy crime. 
If you wed with spoliation, 
Consort with the battle fiend, 
You will meet the pent damnation. 
From your pinnacle bemeaned. 
Darling armies will enslave you. 
Trail your liberties in dust, 
Cursed trade of war deprave you, 
Democratic virtues rust.' 

Pause then ere the curse is spoken, 
Bind the antic folly down: 
Never freedom can be broken 
Save by military crown. 

8 



d 



Imperial Sam 

Among the powers that gem earth's ancient field- 
The youngest of her mighty galaxy — 
Far-blazing in the majesty I wield, 
Humane, Imperial, generous and free, 
Behold me, all mankind, with startled awe. 
And nations bow your sinful timeworn knees; 
A terror of my kind you never saw, 
My justice wills immaculate decrees. 

I whipped old Spain to make dear Cuba free. 

He lies deep in his throat who dares deny it; 

It's parcel of that same humanity 

To hold sweet Cuba though the world decry it. 

In all I do I act with wisdom deep — 

And love? Yes, love's a mighty motive with me- 

To fools my course may seem a little steep, 

The trusty Cubans surely will forgive me. 

With love and force I'll mix the Cubans up: 
Pooh! What care I for any old opinion? 
Brute force will make a goodly marriage cup 
And authorize my conduct of dominion. 
Damn Cuba! — This I say beneath the rose — 
Who cares a twiddle for the blasted nigger? 
Philanthropy's a darling jolly pose 
But no one means it when he is the bigger. 

9 



I want fair Cuba for my trade, that's all; 
And I've a trick that fools the idiot people: 
I'll free her sometime, when her sense grows tall — 
Your Uncle Sam can climb a greased steeple. 
But I'll take care that time may never come, 
Once I have got my throttling grip upon her; 
Then she may squirm aad bite and kick and foam, 
Oh, to the devil with my word of honor! 

But if the bumptious fools at home object, 

And say, Now Sam, this surely is too brazen! 

My trick across the ocean I'll project, 

My pious love near China I'll emblazon. 

We do want China, or our natural slice. 

So we must gobble up the Philippines — 

To love your fellow men is very nice 

When love the dirtiest conscience brightly cleans. 

Now here's the blameless business in a nutshell: 

The Filipinos cannot creep themselves — 

Mere savages that screech and whoop and yell, 

Just playful dancing childish little elves — 

Nor must we turn them back to Spain the hidious, 

But godly take them by the chubby hand — 

That will not seem to any one invidious — 

Be their protector 'till they learn to stand. 

But when we've boozled them to reverent bearing, 
We'll hold them 'till the noon of judgment day; 
Our navy'll set the whole of Europe swearing, 
Our army shall the curdling earth dismay. 
Awed by this screaming military pageant, 
The moral sucklings of our commonwealth 
Will prate no more of duty or 'God's agent,' 
We'll keep the chattels always, for their health. 

10 



1 



The Greatest Thing is Love 

Extend, Lord, a gracious share 

Of thy divine perception, 
To those besotted Filipines 

In wallowing disaffection. 

Why are they not ordained to see 
The love we dangle to them? 

If they would take the baited hook 
I know it would not rue them. 

We do not burn their towns in hate, 
Nor starve their men and women; — 

It is a tender form of fate. 
The bonfire and the famine. 

How sweet it is to see the trail 

Of civilizing sorrow! 
How noble to enjoy the wail 

Of those whose lands we borrow! 

The goodliest form of good on earth 

Is keenly hurting others, 
Putting the dagger in their backs 

And calling them our brothers. 

O Dewey bring the Tagals home 
And bind them to your chariot, 

A million Christians in this land 
Exultingly will carry it. 



11 



Go Die for the President King 

A PATRIOTIC HYMN 

Our Self has determined the savage to save, 
Away to the East with the young and the brave! 
There is honor for them in a Philippine grave — 
And in putting my head in a crown. 

It is noble to die for the soul of the black, 
And wholly sublime his poor body to hack; 
The gates of eternity thus you will crack 
For those upon whom I may frown. 

The saints and the sinners delightedly see 
The deified mission imposed upon me, 
Ordained to conduct a terrestrial spree 
To saddle the white on the brown. 

'Tis little I ask of the world or mankind, 
Imperial rule over white and black "jined," 
A padlock on lip and a handcuff on mind, 
And to pull all the free people down. 

O, mothers, beloved of dead soldier boys, 
Who lift up your cries with a horrible noise, 
I'll settle the score and establish your poise, 
By giving your dead 'uns renown. 

Here's medal and monument, pension and verse, 
Come, hustle your heroes away in a hearse. 
By giving your sons you have won a fat purse, 
And your sorrows in glory may drown. 



12 



American Love 

Piety and buccaneering 
O'er the world I go a steering, 
I'm a pirate to perfection — 
Where the strong have no objection- 
It is my inheritance, 
Greed and Godly eloquence. 
Get it from the berserkers 
And such other sort of curs. 
Have the blue blood of the Viking, 
Infamous and dagger-striking; 
Make a black man think I love him, 
On his bare back and above him; 
Pick his pocket-book of gold, 
Bible at his nose I hold. 
All for Anglo-Saxon glory 
Am I mean and dripping gory — 
Any low thing an excuse 
For premeditate abuse; 
Treachery political 
Black as everlasting hell. 
What's the use of a-begrudgin' 
Use of rapier and bludgeon 
On the stubborn copper heads 
Of the Asiatic reds? 
Kill them out and plant the Saxon — 
Nuts, that Maxim bullets cracks 'em. 



13 



Hie we to antipodes 

Missionary haws and hees, 

University and college — 

Dead men sooner rot with knowledge — 

All the world will bow to God 

When the pedagogues have jawed. 

We shall teach arithmetic 

With an elemental kick; 

Anguish just above distraction 

Is the rule of Anglo fraction; 

Realize geometry 

To a nigger up a tree; 

Fill with metaphysic lore 

Through the rifle's narrow bore; 

Trigonojnic lines and spaces 

Are the Military Graces. 

We can teach anatomy 

To the butchered Tagal free — 

Why not set a clinic up 

At the mouth of every Krupp? 

As for chemic analytic, 

Here's the modern way to hit it: 

Take a gallon of deceit, 

Mix it with a pound of cheat, 

Add for salt hypocrisy. 

Pepper dark with treachery, 

Put it in a skin of love, 

Label it "From God Above": 

Givie it to the patient hot, 

Call the quack a patriot. 

(Any one that's not a hater, 

Stone him with the title 'traitor'; 

Every opposition reason 

Gibbet with the name of treason.) 



14 



Teach the physics of the grave 

To the Filipino slave: 

It is well enough in Hades 

For the Oriental babies, 

They should know their way to spell 

Through the labyrinths of hell. 

With explanatory cheek, 

Make the children English squeak: 

That is over-compensation 

For the stealing of a nation. 

(If a man can lick another 

He may call himself his brother; 

We don't think an action gall 

Where we've only taken all.) 

Cramming for examination 

White man's lead civilization; 

Petrified and A B C'd, 

Maxim gunned and Ph. D.'d — 

Spectacles and Ph. D 

Clothe the naked fit to see. 

Every species of affliction 

Now is healed by learned diction; 

While we blow their heads away, 

Knowledge has its perfect sway; 

Dum dum bullets are a rod '11 

Make the little natives toddle. 



15 



Butcher McKinley 

[While the Weyler of the Philippines was pro- 
ceeding with the slaughter of their inhabitants 
he said at a Boston dinner: "The evolution of 
events which no man could control has brought 
these problems upon us. Certain it is that they 
have not come through any fault on our own part, 
but as a high obligation, . . Until Congress shall 
direct otherwise, it will be the duty of the Execu- 
tive to possess and hold the Philippines, giving to 
the people thereof peace and order and beneficent 
government, affording them every opportunity to 
prosecute their lawful pursuits, encouraging them 
in thrift and industry, making them feel and know 
that we are their friends, not their enemies, that 
their good is our aim, that their welfare is our 
welfare, but that neither their aspirations nor ours 
can be realized until our authority is acknowl- 
edged and unquestioned." He called those present 
to witness that in what he has done to these 
people we were "obeying a higher moral obliga- 
tion." "We were doing our duty by them as God 
gave us the light to see our duty, with the con- 
sent of our own consciences, . . . ."] 

SPEAKS TO THE PEOPLE. 

O Friends and Citizens, judge not my course 
By ordinary law. I am a man of God; 
And when I raise the nation's arm to kill, 
God does it — high-compelling destiny. 

16 



Abate your fears. 'Tis noble, pure and right 

To kill the weak by God's ordainment. 

He does ordain it, through his mighty instrument, 
Myself. 

Sweet friends, sweet fellowmen, sweet voters, 

Call not murder murder if God wills. 

'Tis blasphemy, abortion, miscontent, abomina- 
tion. 

Hell's own self, to charge dear God with crime. 

I must as many Filipinos kill as shall appease 

God's wrath at them for spurning my decree. 

They shall not flout me, damn them, 

Me the mighty Me, backed as I am 

By all the men of wealth in this true land — 

Dear men of wealth! Good men of wealth! 

Think you that God could stand against Mark 
Hanna 

If He would? And all this host of multimillion- 
aires? 

Sweet millionaires disdain me not; believe me 

That I love you, and once more elect me. 

Kind Sirs, I'll gladly kill for you— and God. 

Believe me, God shall be your tool by my com- 
mand. 

ADDRESSES GOD. 

I am a pious man, a holy man, and member of a 

church. 
Did I not tell the damned blacks 
To ground their arms? 
O madness veritable, they disobeyed! 
Fiends, monsters, toads, green lizards, scorpions, 

snakes. 
And other foulnesses I think not of just now — 
Think you resistance possible toward me? 

17 



They must submit. For mean and weak and black 

There is no virtue but submission. 

After submission, — well, we'll see; 

But there's no right the weak can do. 

If they resist the strong. 

Resistance has no earthly name descriptive: 

It is so putrid, dank, disreputably vile. 

You plead for them? 

Great God I thought much better of you. 

First they obey me shall, obedience first, 

Though I should have to rip their bowels forth, 

Burn out their eyes, shoot holes in them 

Like sieves, tear off their fevered flesh. 

And kill their viperish souls. 

It is a law of mine 

That niggers must submit to my sublimity 

Before they gain the earliest fundamental right 

To even live, much less to speak of what they wish. 

Their wish! As if that mattered aught! 

First they obey me shall, if I kill every one. 

Time there will be for kindness when they're dead. 

Oh sin unnameable. Conceit unbearable! To dare 

This opposition! For smaller crimes some pardon. 

But for this damnation, hell, torment. 

Seething, roasting infinite. I'll not be balked, 

They shall be taught my perfect goodness. 

1 

And how I love them! God! Everyone that dies 

In disobedience penetrates my soul! 

I'll see them later, look pityingly down from 

heaven 
Upon their Hell-scorched lips — 
For go to hell they shall for disobedience. 



18 



Heavenly Admiral, Chief Gunner of the batteries 

divine, 
They say I am a Weyler in disguise: 
But You believe it not? I am content! 

1 only kill for you (and millionaires). Did Weyler 

that? 

Let's count the dead. You count the souls, Old 
Man Above, 

And I'll the bodies count — then we'll compare. 

They're only pin-prick souls, they'll crowd not 
hell 

Nor keep bad white men out who later shall 

Go down for spewing at my will. 

Ten thousand! That's my count; a glorious show- 
ing 

For a week of war. Still guide me, dear Re- 
deemer; 

Make my subjects see my virtue and my vastiness, 

And crush my enemies. I'll send you blood 

In pitchers, pails, tanks, pools, 

Lakes, oceans, hemispheres, 

If you'll protect me and my saints the millionaires. 

You're going? Just a word before we part. 
Hush, only whispers now. I want a thing to bor- 
row. 
I'll give You interest on the loan — 
A church or such — perchance another 
Rockefeller college, if my John agrees. 
What loan? Why this— the Devil. 
Don't jump, I only want him for Your good; 
Why should the stain of slaughter be on us? 
Let's use the Devil to help on the Right 
And prop the kingdom of Yourself on earth. 



19 



Send him across the brine to cleave the skulls 

Of those foul imps of mud the Filipinos, 

Against the grain to do it? Now God, just listen: 

Knowing the saint I am can you suppose 

I would do wrong? And more, I've talked with 
Hanna. 

He says the Devil's merely You disguised, 

Your rear or nether side; that most men 

Do not understand Divine anatomy; 

That what the Devil does is your performance, 

But called the Devil for man's dull content. 

You don't deny it? Then here's a secret for you: 

I also am a little black inside. 

It's fun to kill — with arm of law of course — 

For otherwise some fellow might resent it and kill 
me. 

Law is the keenest dagger ere was forged! 

Assassination from my easy White House chair 

Across the world! I'm safe; no Filipino can sur- 
mount 

The pale of Anglo-Saxon law. 

With sleek black coat and polished countenance 

And boots I sit and pen decrees of murder, 

While dazzled men adore my lenient justice. 

Good-bye, we'll chat again anon. ] 
Before that time I'll send You myriads more dead 

blacks. 

But mind You don't forget j 

To order down the Devil. | 

He may be needed here at home. t 

I hear the People's stomach is about j 

To vomit up this Filipino blood. j 

'Tis possible I went too far at first. j 



20 



But if I did the Devil and my brand new army- 
Will quite cure them. No medicine like lead — 
For others. A bullet in the sickly part, presto, 
The man is cured and no more moral spasms. 
When all the better Tagals bite the sand 
There are some damnable Americans shall bite it. 
You say, look out? I swear it, they shall die 
For criticising me. My men of capital ordain 
And I obey. Money and Maxim guns — 
That's my maxim. Good joke? A very stomach 

full 
Of joke — for those who set up liberty against 

monopoly. 
Good-bye again; ta ta. If I'm in trouble You'll 

help? 
Then every bullet hole I make 
Shall be in honor of Your sacred name. 



21 



Cradle Magic of the Millionaire 

Why should I not own all the world? 

There's nothing hinders. With my fine blade, the 

Trust 
I'll plunder common hinds, 
The herd, the rabble, the canaille, 
And make them sullen vassals. 
How? There is the friction point. 
An army I must have, and that same vulgar herd 
Is set like tempered steel against an army. 

Ha! We'll invent a war, 

And paint it soft with words like these — 

Humanity, Philanthropy, The Love of God, 

Reward in Heaven, and Sweet Improvement 

Of Some Sodden Savagery, Rescued from Foul 

Atrocities — for we can always find 

Atrocities at hand in this game world — 

Or make them. 

There's Cuba now, she'll do. 

For Spain is like a woman aged. 

With both feet in the grave 



90 



How shall I rouse our citizens 

And make them hustle on the brutal sword 

With which we'll slay themselves? 

The 'upper class' — sweet sentiment! — we'll trick 

With visions of emolument and fame. 

Who of them can withstand the potent witchery 

Of 'General' beplastered to his name, 

Or 'Colonel' So-and-So, 

And trumped up deeds of valor wired home 

By news reporters who must earn their salt, 

And thank their God they have imaginations? 

The low refuse of men, the stupid millions. 
Well bribe with pepper'd couplets on the Flag 
And patriotic sewer gush about 'their country.' 
Good God! How could we slide the populace to 

hell 
Without this patriotic grease! 
And yet it's funny that they're taken in again — 
The millionth time by measured count — 
By the same foolery! 

You'd think that kittens with unopened eyes 
Would smell the falsehood through. 



23 



Might and Right 

'Might is right,' proclaimed the worldling, seeking 
cause to rob his friend, 

So 'twas ever since the world began, 'twill be so 
till the end. 

In the struggle for existence, lo the weaker is 
devoured, 

Every good thing, if it's weak, is relentlessly de- 
flowered. 

See the human millions suffer for the glutting of 

the few 
Who are worthless to the universe from every 

point of view. 
But the secret of their reigning is the fact that 

they are strong, 
In the universe there's nothing corresponds to 

right and wrong. 

Prate about your "God in heaven," interested in 

the good, 
'Tis the verbiage of the strong to keep the people 

blocks of wood. 
Strange "good God" on throne of power looking 

down upon the earth, 
Witnessing the gloating evil stamping out the 

cause of worth! 



24 



Imperial England, with Thoughts on 
Imperial America 

The birds sing sweetly in the air, 
The kine are basking in the sun, 
The lives of men serenely run. 
And all the world is good and fair. 

The rook attains his usual twig 
And muses, roosting, on events; 
He knows the voluble portents 
That what is going on is big. 

In England thirty million pounds 

Are being spent in jubilee; 

It is a pageant dear to see, 

The philosophic rook sings "Zounds!" 

Brooding upon this spectacle 
A thousand horrors soon emerge; 
Beneath the glittering vesture surge 
The hideous counterparts of hell. 

Rending hypocrisy in twain. 

The queen and all that shining frolic, 

Pretending virtue hyperbolic, 

Are frauds for money half insane. 

25 



The queen is only good in seeming, — 
No parasite is ever good; 
Though masked in virtue's diamond hood, 
For drinking blood it's ever scheming. 

And all these men of noble mien 
From the Lord Mayor up and down, 
In essence every one's a clown, 
"Noble" as far as he is mean. 

For wealth's prodigious beetling structure 

Only sycophancy feeds, 

Never manly virtue breeds, 

That would bring earth-shaking rupture. 

Wealth and meanness go together. 
Pomp is flourished for deceit. 
Celebrations are to cheat 
The piteous people with a feather. 

By vaunting up the nation's size 
And glorifying deeds of blood. 
The masses issue from the mud 
And for a moment cease their cries. 

;. 
Empire is a word for plunder, f 

Reapers are the rich at home; 
Empire-nations' common scum 
Have their vitals fed on wonder. 

Empty stomachs glorify 

At the shameful jubilees, 

Doing so they sweetly please 

The rich for whom they're made to die, 

26 



The rook beheld the world of creatures 
Made by devil, god and chance, 
All mankind in grinning trance 
With infinitely ugly features; 

Warbled forth its heavenly song, 
Resting on its foot of tan, 
"Glad am I I'm not a man. 
Always fiercely doing wrong. 

Fool at birth and fool at dying, 

Fool throughout his worried life. 

All his sweetness burned in strife 

For things not worth the faintest trying. 

Here's the sun and stars and moon. 
Air in meadows green and shaded, 
Here is pleasure for the jaded, 
Man prefers a trader's doom. 

If mankind together strove. 
Doing all for common purpose. 
In the world there would be no curse, 
Man would find the treasure-trove." 

Spreading wings the rook ascended 
Starward all the sable night. 
Hoping there to find the right. 
And the reign of folly ended. 

Warbling through the stillness clear 
Notes that only wild rooks know, 
Thoughts that true rooks never show. 
Songs the earth-born never hear. 

27 



Anglo-Saxon Union 



The English made a festival to canonize their 
queen, 

'Twas full the rankest carnival the earth has ever 
seen; 

The commons swelled and swaggered in the sun 
of majesty, 

The rancid masses fain forgot their blown do- 
mestic sty. 

The secret of the pageant was to deify them- 
selves: 

The several hundred thousand on the British up- 
per shelves; 

The queen's a gilded figure-head, of wooden inner 
view, 

A figure-head for millionaires, the ruling modern 
crew. 

America was proudly represented over there — 
Our Whitelaw Reid and Johnny Hay of glory had 

their share; 
Whitelaw especially did sit in mighty sacred spots, 
He ate with cunning little Wales and other royal 

fops. 

28 



I hardly dare to write the names of those he sat 

among, 
It seems like letting out a lot of greatness at the 

bung; 
He led Princess Victoria — the something to the 

queen — 
To dinner at the Buckingham, to lisp palatial 

cream. 



That was an honor yawning big for a democracy. 

But gloriously it served to puff our Aristocracy; 

The Bishops and the Board of Trade, the Lords 
and noodled Earls, 

Were there with wives and diamonds and daugh- 
ters dear with pearls 



'Taint Whitelaw they are honoring, but the toiling 

crowd of us. 
For the wretched devils in Cherry street they're 

making all this fuss. 
It's the common sixty millions that Old England 

loves so well. 
So well that Wales and the millionaires can hardly 

how much tell. 



How proud I feel of my part of the honoring we get 
When Whitelaw eats with Devonshire and Wales 

and that bloody set! 
My stomach throbs of gastric sport with the 

wine that it doesn't drink, 
My mind is bewitched by the glorious light of the 

thoughts that it doesn t think. 



29 



But in less delirious moments when the ecstacy 

subsides, 
I think how these rich despise me, and of several 

things besides — 
How the millionaires of England, who invented 

this shining spree, 
And their brother rich in America are spreeing 

on you and me. 

And the light of my dazzled stomach sinks down 
to a lower peg — 

Seen through the eye of the common herd, the 
boot's on the other leg. 

The world has one ruling family, reposing on all 
the thrones. 

Cankered, degenerate, half-insane, selfishness- 
whitened bones. 

The rich of the civilized nations walk firm in the 

royal tracks. 
One mighty family of wealth enthroned on the 

money sacks; 
One gang of world-topping adventurers, royal and 

rich combined. 
Handsomely buccaneering all laboring humankind. 

The way these royal thrones live on's as clear as 

Yankee jokes: 
The powerful new take up the cue and perpetuate 

the hoax; 
The rich attach themselves to thrones and prop 

them up with gold. 
The people say this is the way that we were ruled 

of old. 

30 



Ruling's a pretty decent trade, if people tell the 

truth, 
But those who make it pay the best must learn 

it in their youth. 
Victoria started early, mat's the gospel reason 

she 
Has laid a heap of money up and had a jubilee. 

But if you would have union of the Anglo-Saxon 

race, 
If you would wipe dishonor from the Anglo-Saxon 

face, 
Abhor the king and wealthy man, and sweep them 

from the fold, 
Restore the common people to the sceptre and the 

gold. 

Otherwise your smart alliance of the robbers at 

the top 
Will be a pandemonium dance of devil and of cop; 
The union of the people and extinction of the few 
Will usher in the end of sin and blend the old and 

new. 



John Bullet 

The Jubilee is done and Holy John 

Lays off the irksome robes of pious peace, 

Takes on his customary butcher's garb, 

And sails to Africa to quench his thirst. 

Great Britain is the synonym for Lie! 

Who can describe the meanness of that race — 

The devil cunning and hypocrisy 

Which celebrates the primacy of love. 

Extols the theme of universal peace, 

Swears oaths to Justice and to Liberty, 

And in its cesspool soul plots strenuous rape. 

Revolves like cud more murderous exploits, 

And works its peaceful protestations up 

Into excuses to befoul the homes of men! 

Accursed England, in its soul unfit 

To be the dung heap of the nether world. 



32 



Possessional 



A VICTORIOUS ODE 

God of our nabobs lone and bold — 
Lord of our Christian noblemen — 
Beneath whose awful hand we hold 
A rented right to hut and fen — 
Lord God of Boasts, be with them yet 
And help them get— and help them get! 

We know Thou art of gentle heart 
To those who love Thee while they kill, 
On hurtling battle plain and mart 
Inform us with Thy warlike skill. 
Dear Soul of Heav'n, forsake us not! 
Till all is got— till all is got! 

If contrite prayer we lift to Thee 
In votive honor for our crimes, 
From scalding conscience make us free, 
Accept the praises of our rhymes. 
Almighty Ghost, be Thou content, 
If we keep Lent — if we keep Lent! 

33 



The Czar invokes to holy peace, 
Disarmament of all mankind: — 
Eternal woe! Are nations geese? 
The tricky Czar we'll trip behind! 
Quick, God of Bloodshed, from Thy Star 
His precepts mar — his precepts mar! 

Prime God of swords and battle cries — 
To Whom the dog Czar sneaks a glance — 
We want no peace in earth or skies. 
War is the sweetest circumstance. 
Most High, we adulate Thy will — 
To pray and kill — to pray and kill! 

Eternal one, Old England vows 
Cathedrals of majestic mould. 
Our haughty neck before Thee bows, 
Pawn us the planet for our gold. 
We are Thy patron, Lord above, 
Pay for our love — pay for our love! 

Send all the world but us to hell — 
They are not Englishmen, You know — 
Thy mighty Name with trumpet yell 
Across the universe we'll blow! 
Most modest God, Oh, love us well — 
For others hell — for others hell! 

Laureate Fog-Horn Amen! 

of the Anglo-Saxon Race. SKIPLING. 



fli 



34 



The Cosmopolitan Business Man's 
Creed 



My creed is simple you may know, 
I live in the modern days; 
I believe in the son and holy ghost 
And the father when it pays. 

I love my neighbor as myself 
In church on Sundays rare, 
But on the week-days of the year 
I fleece him all I dare. 

When I was just a little boy 
My conscience used to prick. 
But now it uses all its strength 
To make my rival sick. 

I work the Church for all it's worth, 
To get a holy name; 
It makes the simple and the good 
A very easy game. 

The ten commandments are a trick 
To lariat the mob. 
But all of them a man of brains 
Will break without a sob. 

To lie, Oh well, you're not a fool, 
We lie in every breath; t 

And swear; you can't swear by a god 
That's paralyzed to death. 

35 



To rob is glorious sport, you know, 
The universal fun; 
We do it by commercial laws 
And never use a gun. 

The only thing that's really smart, 
In these unwarlike days, 
Is murder carried on by us 
In several hundred ways. 

We murder men in factories 

And on our railroad trains, 

And when they make a row in towns 

We batter out their brains. 

Policemen do the actual work 
Of opening their heads, 
While we're at dinner in the club. 
Or snoring on our beds. 

Whenever we can get a chance 
To gatling gun the crowd. 
We have a Spanish holiday 
And sell them all a shroud. 

We like to kill at stated times. 
In millions two or three, 
The dictionary name is war, 
But that's a josh you see. 

It's just a little way we have 
To clean the people out, 
Whenever they too many are 
For us to lead about. 



36 



We call a dinner party of 
The Rich Men of the world, 
And order kings and presidents 
To have the flags unfurled; 

We fill the newspapers with noise, 
And start a general schism, 
And have the pulpits of the land 
Preach blood and patriotism. 

Then all the men who are not rich 
And all of tender age 
Go forth to save their glorious land 
From foes we roused to rage. 

They know not what they fight about. 
But then they needn't know, 
They fight for us that stay at home 
And never strike a blow. 

And when enough on each side have 
Been honorably killed, 
We tell our presidents and kings 
To have the battle stilled. 

To murder is a joy to us 
Because it pays in cash: 
It is the cheapest way we know 
To get around a crash. 

It also pays in coupons and 
In bonds of every kind. 
For we conduct the government 
To get our pockets lined. 



37 



The ten commandments are sublime 
For our financial ends; 
To keep the people good and down 
Their doctrine ever tends. 

The gospel law to us is this: 
The law of love to break, 
But every other class of men 
The medicine must take. 

Our creed is then to have no creed 
For which we care a penny; 
But to employ the word of god 
To tangle up the many. 



38 



Prayer of the Rich 

Give us this day our daily bread, 
And dividends paid up ahead, 
And plenty of poor men in our power, 
With women and children to devour. 
And churches for the Sunday hour, 
Where we can worship Tnee, O Lord, 
And think of heaven and our reward 
For being good in a world of sin 
And saving a small amount of 'tin.' 

Give us this day our neighbor's bread, 

We'll sell or eat it in his stead. 

Lord, give Thyself no further trouble 

About this planetary bubble; 

We know its needs as well as Thou, 

Devoutly we have studied how 

To reap where others weep and sow. 

Give us our neighbors' daily bread. 

And pour the blessing on our head. 

So go Thy way and pleasure seek. 

We'll make it cheerful for the weak. 



39 



God, blot the poor out of existence, 
They trouble us with their insistence. 
You surely haven't got the cheek 
To fill up heaven with the meek? 
Just fancy how the place would reek! 
And if you want US for companions, 
Damn deep the miserable poor ones. 
Aristocratic hell is better 
Than heaven peopled from the gutter. 

Before you're off attend a second. 

For always on your help we've reckoned. 

We ask for ministers to save us, 

And learned college profs to praise us; 

The lawyer's a convenient fellow, 

With such an aptitude to bellow 

For any cause with gold below. 

Thank you, Jehovah, for these boons, 

With them we'll steal the poor man's spoons; 

And if we meet a dangerous grudge, 

Please send us down a supreme judge. 



* 



m 



40 



The Free American Workingman 

I live in the grandest earthly land, 
Far from the curse of kingly hand, 
Where men for eternal justice stand, 
And I am free. 

The people of all the earth combine 
To create a race of men sublime, 
In the keen and rich American clime. 
Where I am free. 

Our wealth no nation can surpass, 
Nor our brave aristocratic class, 
Or the people, a toiling mighty mass. 
All of them free. 

I'm proud of our glorious millionaires, 
Greater than lordly foreign peers, 
For aught but money with no cares. 
Men truly free. 

I have no land, but only brawn; 
Often for food my coat I pawn, 
But I love the place where I belong 
And am so free. 

41 



They turned me out of the work I had 
Because I voted as father did, 
And not as the master's orders bid, 
I who am free. 

My wife, she died, but that's not new; 
Factory women can't undo 

Ills that have rotted them through and through. 
Although they're free. 

That daughter with dainty hands and feet — 
You know it? Well, she's on the street; 
'Twasn't her fault — the times were tight; 
Yes, she is free. 

My bashful boy became a tramp; 
Odd lot for such a little scamp, 
Too timid to sleep without a lamp, 
And now so free. 

Somehow the country isn't right. 
Everything's gone to the elite. 
And the lot of the many isn't sweet, 
Although it's free. 

But I don't give up to discontent. 
Calamity men can't prevent, 
For the most of them it's precedent, 
Even when free. 

And it's right enough that we should toil 
And grub our crumbs from borrowed soil. 
And try hard nature's hate to foil, 
If we are free. 



42 



And right for the rich man to have all, 
To live in ravishing palace hall, 
While we drink bitterness and gall, 
If we are free. 

I wouldn't complain of such a lot. 
For it doesn't help a visible jot; 
The few have always owned the pot. 
Of work scot free. 

Nor you mustn't find fault with the universe. 
For it only makes a sad thing worse. 
And brings upon you the bitter curse 
Of all the free. 

So sit you down in a quiet spot. 

And brood on the grand things now forgot, 

And let the good things in you rot. 

So do the free. 

When we haven't anything else to be, 
And life is a surfeit of misery. 
Then death relieves our penury, — 
Forever free. 



43 



Equality 

Two little men in a red ripe world 

Determined to fight one day; 
One was a workingman, trouble-soiled, 

The other a rich man gay. 

"Before we fight," said the capitalist, 

"Everything fair must be. 
I'll tie your ankles and bind your fist, 

And then you will equal me." 

An injunction he put on the workman's arm, 

A policeman on either leg; 
To prevent him from doing any harm, 

He sewed him up in a bag. 

"Now," said the rich man, "let's be fair; 

Be square, be fair, I say; 
I believe in the efficacy of prayer — 

To begin with, let us pray." 

While the poor man closed his eyes in prayer. 

And bowed his trusting head, 
The rich man laid a legal snare 

And removed adjacent bread. 



44 



"Now then," he cried, as he danced on air, 
"The rules of the fight are these: 

Strike here, strike there, strike everywhere, 
And strike as hard as you please." 

He kept himself at a distance safe. 

And hurled starvation rocks, 
In hand he held the militia staff 

To administer crisis knocks. 

The fight was awful, as you may judge; 

Blood flowed in a gurgling stream. 
"I swear I'm brave, and I'll never budge!" 

Was the rich man's battle scream. 

The workman was soon a ghastly sight. 
And the rich man stormed in glee: 

"By Jove! The Lord fights with the right, 
In a land of equality." 



46 



The Primitive Races Shall Be 
Cultured 

Softly, a cultured one approaches, 

Muffle your tones; 
No highly polished man encroaches 

On rugged zones. 

You'll plunge the gentleman in spasms 

If you imply 
That there are any social chasms 

So very nigh. 

Don't talk of hunger revolution 

Within his sphere, 
It is a vulgar proposition 

For him to hear. 

Soups mixed with social tittle-tattle 

Are better themes. 
Slum clubs to teach the hungry prattle 

And culture dreams. 

'A sometime half-hour with the waif-rakes 

Indeed I prize; 
Such leisure consecrate to their sakes 

Diversifies.' 

46 



If between books and social honey 

Charity peeps, 
He gracefully dispenses money 

And nearly weeps. 

He can discourse consummate wisdom 

On rules of good, 
And prove that you must never use them 

Although you slxould. 

He'll qualify your deepest insight 

With mists of thought, 
Show triumphs over might by right 

Are dearly bought. 

He wants to vegetate serenely 

In sweetness light, 
Elforts to hasten knows he keenly 

Are never right. 

Tell him the world is nearly perfect 

And he'll agree — 
Say there's a sweet transcendent object 

In cruelty. 

This is the kind of sips and surfeits 

That he enjoys; 
The owl philosophy of comfits 

Which he employs. 

Now for the sake of cosmic culture 

Progress must stop. 
And life become a white-sepulture 

Politeness prop. 

47 



Tweedle de Kipling 

I writes of war and 'eroes, bless me eyes! 
See me counthry tackle people of its size! 

From the grapple of the ape 

Never shall the Boer escape 
While me pen with bloody inspiration flies. 

Have ye heerd the tender poem that's me last? 
'Tis a mimic of the Day of Judgment blast; 

Hittin' at the nasty Boers, 

Which is patriotic sure's 
I repents me who the Widder Windsor sassed. 

Gather round me Tommy Atkins and the girls 
Yez hev ruined in yer canvassin' fer pearls; 

Ye'r a fancy specimen 

Of the genus Englishmen, 
Just the bloomin' beef to slaughter in the Kraals. 

Have ye said yer thanks to God, ye shootin' bum- 
mer? 

All the churches is a praisin' ye with mummer; 
And the queen, God bless her liver. 
May her smile the whole earth kiver, 

Or me light go out ez literary hummer. 



48 



Bulldog of Liberty 

Swooning Gods! can this vicious old England im- 
agine 

Herself the defender of Liberty's shrine? 
Believes she the fable, lie-scented and laughing, 

That she is the breeder of Freedom divine? 

No such light delusion fleet skips through her 
fancy, 

A friendless confusion she fondles in vain. 
On her bed lies the world for benign vivisection, 

She thinks with .a lie to relieve it of pain. 

For pain, to the Children of Time, is their money, 
Bereft of it all would in happiness be; 

So quaintly she saves them by taking it saintly — 
Vicarious redeemer is certainly she. 



49 



John Rockefeller 

WRITTEN BY THE CHICAGO UNIVERSITY 

Than whom the ruddiest rays of romping sun 
Less brightly 'radiate this happy land, 
My benefactor with Olympic hand, 
Out-leaping nature, Thou Supremest One! 
All-potent author of my Lights and towers, 
Whose fecund Word creates strange dividends 
Like Eve, not for lascivious private ends 
But to embellish these moral college bowers: 
Without thee. Patron, had my fearsome life 
Choked early out in stainless poverty; 
Superbly has thy consecrated strife 
Cajoled thy country by adorning me. 
Do what thou wilt, with Trust, or bribe, or knife, 
I'll garland thee. Thy University. 



50 



The Brothers 

Two brothers started in this world as twins; 
Alack, the one through copious crimes and sins 
Grew rich; the other honest staid and poor, 
And in his brother's rich eyes was a boor. 

Never a copper did he once receive, 
Although his need was sore with no reprieve; 
Like that poor nephew of the modern Sage, 
Who mortgaged a lean farm in his old age. 

But speculation walks on treacherous ice, 
And countless wealth goes under in a trice; 
Our twin awoke, one morning, penniless, 
Scarce twenty thousand dollars left to bless. 

He raved and swore and broke his heart and died. 
That such dire poverty did him betide. 
How could he creep through his declining years. 
Stung by old friendship's diabolic sneers? 



51 



The paltry twenty thousand went to him 
Whose want had ever bubbled o'er the brim. 
And filled him with such drastic ecstacy 
That his insides a cauldron came to be. 

The rivets of his being fell apart, 
And he expired of frenzied happy heart. 
Into one grave they tumbled poor and rich, 
The scientific gods knew which was which. 

One thing alone to common man was clear: 
That money prematurely loads the bier; 
It cracks the brain of men before their time, 
And starts them forth on their celestial climb. 

I would that all who money love so much 

Might crack, and heavenward speed upon that 

crutch — 
Letting the world be peopled by the rest, 
Who think that glowing life, of all's the best. 



52 



I Am a Just God 

In Africa there loomed a cloud 
The size of an infant's hand. 

It grew in wrath and breathed aloud 
It's justified deinand. 

All-ruling God omnipotent, 
Whom heavenly hosts invoke, 

In thunder tones the spaces rent. 
In thunder sternly spoke: 

'My voice peals from the infinite, 

It calls from the unseen; 
The free are holy in my sight, 
I trample low the mean. 

*By million-shafted power opprest. 

Begirt by venomed hate, 
Still lies my awful arm in rest 
The right to vindicate. 

'My justice guides the bellowing storm 

And conjures it for good, 
My love enfolds the meanest worm. 

And destines brotherhood.' 



63 



The night was black, the cannon roared, 
And the beacon lights went out. 

Where now is the hand of the mighty Lord, 
Our serried foe to rout? 

The desert answered to the sea, 

The rocks gave back their thought — 
'Ah, deep eternal mystery, 
The Lord availeth naught. 

'In boasting Bible he contends 

In poesy's sweet sound. 
On flute and harp for noble ends. 
But wards no living wound. 

'No trumpet with exulting strains. 
Nor lightning, cleaves the sky. 
The hand of Providence remains 
In eminence on high.' 

In Afric's desert dark and cold 

Lay Freedom on the sand: 
The God of Promise^ as of old, 

Had vanished from the land. 

Then trouble not the gloom with prayer 

Said unavailingly. 
But strike with fury, scorning care. 

Die unbewailingly. 



54 



1 



Rebels 

[Written on the adoption by sub-Sovereign Otis 
of the policy of court-martialing and shooting Fili- 
pino patriots as traitors to their American mother- 
country. It will be decreed that guerilla fighters 
are murderers.] 

Death, death, to the Philippine foe! 

Heed not, hear not, their cries of woe! 
Rebel sires shall be mown low, 

Sons their blood in base grave sow. 

Hold, Lord, the Orient Isles! 

Magical craft and soldiers' wiles. 
Through fever swamp and hell's defiles. 

Black night of pestilential trials! 

Thousands dead and charred their homes, 

Maniac devastation roams. 
Red guerilla warfare gloams, 

Hate infernal livid foams. 



55 



Suicide stalks throughout the camp, 
Infinite fire of fever cramp; 

Death moves by with evil tramp, 
Peace no Godhead can revamp. 

Madness storms the soldiers' brain, 
Fiends and fury, leaden rain! 

Life's last agonizing strain 
Fades in lunacy's refrain. 

Brand the patriots, have them shot! 

Treason, murder, guerilla plot! 
Toss them in courtmartial pot! 

Hangman's halter and let them rot! 



56 



Man 

O give me a day on the wide sea beach, 

A day in the woodland deep, 
Where the cruel roar of civilized man 

Is lulled for the time to sleep. 

O let me sail from tne land away, 

Away in the infinite night. 
To gather breath in the peace beyond. 

In the foaming storm of flight. 

Word shot back from the Isle Despair, 

Shot back with raving wail, 
Sail to the West, sail to the East, 

Your fiery search will fail. 

For ever above the beautiful boom 

Of nature's wild health note 
Re-echoes the growl of a chosen doom 

From the savage human throat. 



57 



Tyrants of the Republic 

Are there no tyrants in a land republican in name? 
No foes of human liberty accursed, unashamed? 
We have them that abash the Turk in cruelty and 

greed; 
Uncrowned, but with envenomed dirk they ravish 

human need. 

The man that holds a nation's wealth in bound 
monopoly, 

That man's remorseless emperor, king absolute is 
he. 

Old kings are held by silent chains in aged cus- 
tom wrought. 

But the Lord of Concentrated Wealth pays fealty 
to naught. 

No conflict of the centuries has sheared his wax- 
ing power, 

He is, through error of the gods, Liberty's highest 
flower; 

He governs with the fiction rod of equal human 
rights. 

The right to take his brother's all and kill him if 
he fights. 



58 



'We were not born of heavenly gods, divinely- 
charged to rule, 

But are the simple mould and clay of wise man 
and of fool. 

If we then mount the clouds and grind our coun- 
trymen to chaff, 

They shall in ashes bow their heads with thank- 
fulness and laugh. 

'If each man has a right to earn the planet for 

his own, 
There obviously is no wrong to those who miss 

the boon; 
Their duty, having lost the game, is meekly to sit 

down 
And be the footstool of the few who won the 

wandering crown. 

'To cry injustice on the heads of those whose 

lucky toil 
Secures dominion of the earth as fair commercial 

spoil. 
Is quite beneath the chivalry of men who give 

and take. 
E'en tho the 'give' turns out to be a leaded-dice 

mistake. 



59 



'It would be right to punish us if we were named 

The King, 
But since we are just 'citizen' the slaves our 

praises sing: 
"Behold our mighty ones!" they cry, in amorous 

ecstacy, 
"Let them abide, by Fortune's grace the lucky 

had been we!" ' 

To this our free Republic the tyrant has returned, 

Blacker, meaner, more desperate than him of old 
we spurned. 

Tear down this tyrant from the height he has at- 
tained in crime. 

There shall be freedom here again, again be right 
sublime. 



60 



Who Save the World 

Two peoples war today for human worth, 

While near twelve hundred million mouthers are 

Detoning periods on the sneering air, 

Of Freedom stretching past the planet's girth: 

High-nurtured heroes in the spirit-waste, 

The Boers, majestic, solemn, eminent, free, 

Withstanding England at Thermopylae, — 

And Luzon warriors fighting this disgraced 

Republic, contaminate tomb of Liberty, 

Where God-born principles have been effaced. 

Grand is the page of Holland in the bright 

Immortal portaiture of tyrants' flight! 

Protect us, Luzon sable sons of youth, 

Who bring through death triumphancy for truth. 



61 



f 



The Workingman's Opportunity 

The workingman who heretofore has cringed, 
The mockery and sorrow of mankind, 
A Caliban with partial human mind 
And every right and attribute infringed, 
In primal being from the world uptorn — 
Holds now the chance of ages in his hand, 
Holds by the throat the tyrants that have damned, 
The infamous crew that have the purple worn. 
He can throw down the buttressed robber clan 
That has assailed the righteous Philippines, 
Crush under that rapacious type of man 
On which the coward president falsely leans. 
United Labor rushing to the van 
Can save itself and this vile nation cleanse. 



62 



This Dying Country 

When I behold the country that I love 

Fast to the death-grip of the millionaire, 

Whose savagery conceives no checks or bounds, 

I marvel at the fabric of my race. 

Our freedom, offspring of a thousand years. 

Is tamely rendered up to please the brutes; 

The multitude bewail with jaws agape. 

Deeds they could throttle down with one swift 

blow; 
Their resolution is enchained by fears 
That shame the courage of a little child. 

And to this crime the good are partisan. 
For they with ethic cowardly and cheap — 
Morality pretentious but unreal — 
Cry 'hush' to every keen unscabbard'd word, 
And 'speak, good sir, with mildness, for effect; 
Abstention cultivate, and on the granite 
Feelings of the steel-cased rich walk softly; 



63 



Attack their fortress with a bow and arrow, 
The gentle politicians with tin horns. 
They mean well; truth without a coat is vile, 
Like human flesh audaciously unclothed. 
It's better far to keep the truth at home 
Than let it roam and rampage in its shirt.' 

j 
So speak 'the good' with wily wise intent 
To risk no business bones of their's in wrestle 
With dangerous foes, th' embattled millionaires. 
Politeness sweet is worth a roll of gold, 
A place, a dinner party, or a vote. 
To throw away which for the country's sake 
Is folly, crude, unripe, pernicious, insolent. 

There once were men enamored so of truth 
They told it like th' uncringing cannon ball 
Which speeds its course without polite deflection; 
Enamored so of high sweet liberty 
They cut their tyrants down with words of steel. 
With our dwarfed souls we cannot touch their 
knees. 

That lusty virile generation dead. 

We in their places stalk like tonsured ghosts, 

Discharged from universal obligation. 

Be courteous to your lynchman, is our law, 

To the highwayman shooting out our brains, — 

A courtesy that spreads us in the grave 

And deeds our traitored country to the fiends. 



64 



And yet there may be living iron ore 
In rocks uncultured by the acid world. 
There may be souls today in embryo 
Of such titanic size and fashioning 
That the frail tissues of deformed words, 
Enchaining principles with temperate smirks, 
Will fall before their impendin:; scornful strokes. 
And this great world, enslaved to forms and 

sounds. 
Burst free and tread its orbit in the real. 



65 



McKinley's Cabinet Meeting 

With haggard eyes our solons rack 

Their brains: Gage, Alger, Smith, Long, Mack, 

That Smith, the tyrant of the mails. 

Who robs the post and pamphlets steals, 

Our little country to protect 

From Aguinaldo's fierce elect. 

The awful Griggs, the rhyme of pigs. 

For liberty cares not two figs; 

He says he'll hang the horrid devil 

That helps the Filipino rebel. 

John Long who propagates our ships, 

Flounders in millions to his hips; 

The people pay a pretty bill 

To eat the bitter fruit of hell. 

But after Mack the greatest quack 

Is Alger, curse the day alack. 

When that poor toadlet of the war 

Drank gore and made the people pour 

Their lives upon his smelling altar — 

Whose neck should now be in a halter. 

But Mack insists he's pure and good. 

And Eagan, too, and that canned food. 

And would not let his Algy go 

To save the land from war and woe. 



66 



For Mack would cut the nation's throat 
To get a presidency vote. 
Among these sages is John Hay, 
V/ho followed one named Billy Day. 
These fellows gather in a meeting, 
They bow and smirk the country greeting. 

MACK. 
Wise men, from every part selected, 
If I can be again elected, 
I promise you fat pay and office, 
Influence, consequence and soft place. 
Help me out of this horrible muddle, 
Cuban and Filipino puddle. 
I thought I would have a walk-away. 
Banners, dances, jigs and play. 
With the pigmies over the briny way. 
Who show fiends' fighting to stay, 
And pinch my ankles, legs and thighs, 
As if they were somewhere near my size — 
I thought I was fighting a little cock, 
But I seem to have struck a living rock. 
Now this won't do, I must eschew 
Such cruelty and cry and hue, 
Or my vexed people will repent, 
Resent and on me anger vent. 
And kick me to oblivion's murk 
Where I shouldn't be able to breathe or smirk, 
Having stood on the world's high pinnacle 
And seemed to be vast and inimical 
To the rights of a few little copper ants 
Whose manners are such they don't wear pants. 



67 



But they'll put me out of the presidency, 

For the dumb and the blind begin to see 

That I made this war for my renown — 

In which I confess I was a clown. 

Just think! "McKinley, Emperor 

Of America, Cuba and Asier!" 

Lord Peter! If I could get that title 

I'd do any cursed thing that might'll 

Accomplish within the brief sad span 

A term in the White House gives a man! 

I'd make a dozen peoples slaves, 

I'd fill a million million graves, 

Ha! Ha! I've filled up several now, 

Some soldiers have gone to the Old Bowwow! 

But Napoleon One killed more than I; 

I weep to think he climbed so high 

And leaves me straddling on the wind 

With the reputation of having sinned. 

But damn! — Excuse, I'm a Methodist, 

Yet I can't endure the popular fist 

Which cuffs and buffets my noble cheek 

Until with the wrath of hell I reek. 

I'd like the American throat to cut. 

That makes me a spectacle and butt — 

But I see I wander, my mind grows dim, 

I've lost my spunk and hope and vim 

Since, aspiring to be a Napoleon. 

I feel and am mis'rably sat upon 

By the scum of the earth whom I despise 

But must cater to to get the prize. 

O God! Was it you that set this trap 

And made me dream to enlarge the map? 



68 



I thought it would help the Methodist Church, 

But you seem to have left me in the lurch. 

I wander again; is my whole mind gone 

Since I put my principles in pawn? 

I think I had some once, eh. Hay? 

A poet like you says what he may. 

But henchmen, followers, vassals true, 

Throw me a straw in this hot stew, 

Pull me ashore from this sea of gore; 

Of Imperialism, hush, no more. 

If I only knew where I was at, 

And didn't feel like a drowning rat! 

Griggs, you're a lawyer, what are you for 

If in this hades you can't do more 

Than call men traitors and stop the mails, 

You and Smith there? — and if that fails 

My goose is cooked and I am booked 

For derision cunningly barbed and hooked. 

Speak up, if you would an emperor make me, 

Out of this lethargy retake me. 

Chancellors of my coming Court, 

Fix me a dose of shrewd retort 

For the drabs who talk of the Constitution, 

And Liberty in dissolution. 

ALGER. 

Most noble master, I've a plaster 

A woman can use when one has sassed her. 

Ex , pardon, a woman you're not, I know, 

But the leering country will have it so. 
Let pass, for it certainly doesn't matter, 
If you get whatever is on the platter. 



69 



My plan is this: provoke more wars, 

Stir up the Cuban till he roars, 

Don't lick the Philippines in a hurry, 

But go it slow and let the war worry 

Our anti-warriors till they yield 

A standing army and naval shield, 

With which you can smash their liberties 

And Philippine freedom coolly freeze. 

An empire needs an army of size. 

Then mortified freedom droops and dies. 

McKINLEY. 
Brave Alger, you have spoken well, 
It shall be done, I'll crack the knell 
Of every American institution 
With an army bloated for revolution. 
Now Smith, they say you've got a brain. 
Show that it isn't yet distrain. 

SMITH. 
Your Majesty, I've a little plan 
Becoming the mind of a little man. 
It's simple but drastic, Sire, you know 
To the root of the trouble I'll go below. 
Put shackles on the Anti press. 
Arrest, and make their dough a mess. 

McKINLEY. 
My mind approves, I'll name you lord 
Of several counties for your word. 
Lord Smith, or Lord what shall it be? 
Prepare to arrest for lese me. 
Who's next? You Griggs? Come to the scratch; 
You must lay an infernal egg to hatch. 

GRIGGS. 
I'll do it. Serene and Excellent, 
Or of my birthday will repent. 



70 



I'll go one better than Emory Smith, 

My scheme possesses a nasty pith; 

Would dub each anti-expansionist 

A traitor, and on his criminal wrist 

Handcuffs would lock, his tongue to block; 

Would eradicate the ghastly flock 

Of treason-breeders and talkers glib, 

Who poke the galleries in the rib 

And tell them to mind their ps and qs 

Or all possessions you will fuse 

Into your slick imperial crown. 

Over the corpses you have sown. 

Treason's the v/ord to fling broadcast, 

Hang up the traitors to the mast, 

Put them in prison, hiss and shoot, 

Dig them out by the trunk and root! 

Never a man who thinks his thought 

Shall live in the empire you have wrought. 

Don't fear, dear Caesar, strike them quick, 

Hound them to death with shaft and prick; 

Then you will ride a placid realm, 

Which you will steer with a gatling helm. 

McKINLEY. 
Duke Griggs, you're a creature of solid gold. 
Born of the fiends in sheol bold. 
Herewith I do Your Grace empower 
To make the dogs my enemies cower. 
Lynch them, torture them, hunt them down, 
Under the cover of legal gown; 
Throttle the press, garrote the book, 
Gibbet the speaker that dares to look 
Sidewise at my doings, and you I'll give 
A State for your dukedom to help you live. 



71 



GRIGGS. 
(Bowing his head on the cabinet carpet.) 
Worshipful, vast, adorable Chief, 
Your's be the glory of my fief. 
McKINLEY. 

(With growing confidence.) 
Ho, Hay, and what have you to offer? 
There must be coin in your mind's coffer. 

HAY. 

Huge symbol of Divinity, 

Majestic shoot of eternity, 

Sprung from the gods by gods sustained, 

Back to the gods sometime to wend, 

A god yourself in attribute. 

Immortal essence of the loot — 

McKINLEY (interrupting). 

I name you poet laureate, 
Ride with me the wings of Fate, 
Sing my deeds when I repose, 
Lie about my crimes and woes. 

HAY. 

I will, sweet Sovereign, Sun and Light, 
Your goodness locks my conscience tight. 
But now my plan, a statesman s word 
Attend, and act when you have heard. 
If worst runs on the heels of worst 
In this exalted drama curst, 
This avalanchal escapade, 
Where flirting fortune is a jade, 
And all the winds of azure heaven 
Play devil with the magic seven — 



72 



Mckinley. 

John, as a poet I respect you, 

But this imperial fever and ague 

Has loosed the staples of my mind, 

And to your thought meseems I'm blind. 

HAY. 
Pardon poetry pragmatic, 
I spoke in riddles diplomatic. 
I've been to England do remember, 
And came home only last December. 
Plain, uncultured prose to speak, 
Slap some Power on the cheek. 
Have another war with Europe: 
That'll make the Yankees whoop up 
Battleships and fine battalions 
By the ten or twenty millions; 
They'll forget in half a jiffy 
That they were a little miffy 
When you baked the Eastern pie, 
That they heaved a gentle sigh 
Of reproach and contumely. 
With their conscience vain and steely 
They'll go mad and patriotic. 
War will make them idiotic; 
Proof of this our Spanish tussle, 
Which created such a bustle 
And upset the nation's heart 
Like a corner apple-cart. 

McKINLEY (beaming). 
Good John, your words pontifical 
Lift from my mind the fatal spell 
Of fear and feeble hesitation 



73 



At courting ruin for the nation. 
Unloose the war-dogs and the blast 
Of rumbling cannon through the planet: 
By this tremendous ruse I'll plan it 
To pass this mighty nation's checks in, 
Or make myself its mighty rex in. 
Place of Republican hollow forms, 
Already gnawed by trusts and worms, 
I'll stake the country's worthless life 
To get a crown for me and wife; 
I'll stir my people up to crush a 
Foe like Germany or Russia; 
About a million well-armed men 
Will be our private army then, 
And I the lord and chief despotic 
Over America neurotic. 

(McKinley pauses. A cloud comes over his face. 
He stands with head bent looking fiercely at the 
floor in the attitude used by Napoleon in such 
cases.) 

JOHN LONG (timidly). 

Hath some uncouth rebellious phantom 
Challenged Your Highness like a bantam? 

McKINLEY. 

'Tis this: I know not how to ravish 

The people to a war so lavish. 

They'll fight a little paltry power 

Like Spain or Aggie any hour, 

But Russia's quite a different nation 

To tackle without provocation. 

My people certainly'l object, 

For fear they may get shortly licked. 



74 



» 



We must a trick and trap combine 
To bring their folly into line. 
I see none, that I will admit; 
And if you can't I'll have a fit. 

(All are silent and a heavy gloom settles down 
on the cabinet.) 

McKINLEY (brightening suddenly). 
Ha! Singular I never thought on't 
To have the mighty Hanna brought on't! 
Run Griggs or Smith, whiche'er's the fleetest, 
Summon our Warwick him that beatest. 
HANNA. 

(Enters, followed by Smith and Griggs out of 
breath. Speaks.) 

I'm called here to disperse distraction. 

Being a man of brain and action. 

The trouble will I quickly settle 

With double use of leaden metal. 

We must create some labor mobs 

To give the military jobs; 

The cords of labor bind on tighter 

To make the workingman a fighter. 

In every quarter of the land 

I'll agitate the bloody hand: 

Riots will make the timid howl 

And cry for an army with a growl. 

I know the way, for medal and pay 

The soldier will shoot his friends all day— 

Particularly the working man. 

Who worships the god, a dinner-can. 

Better than foreign war by far 

Is a bloody domestic labor jar. 



75 



Mckinley (aside). 

(This godless creature would be king; 
Must put his bull neck in a ring.) 
(Aloud, to Hanna.) 

Salt of my soul, henceforth shalt own 
Each workingman and stock and stone 
Within the cosmos of the bullets 
Warmed up for their digestive gullets. 

(Ceases speaking, is ill at ease, rubs his hands 
and cracks his fingers to escape Hanna's magnetic 
eye. A cold sweat dampens his fabrics. Sees Root 
and blurts out:) 

Now there comes Root, a little coot, 
Disposed to make the Tagal scoot. 
I like the name of Elihu, 
It runs so well with hack and hew. 
Now, Elly, give us your advice, 
With smokeless powder as a spice. 

ROOT. 
Great diner out and eater in, 
Your maw shall have the Philippine; i 

I promise fifty darkey legs ;, 

As tender, young as soft poached eggs; 
Your murky brain shall have a tonic. 
Our butcher shop is economic — 
A carcass CQmes in every minute, 
I'll set my office clerks to skin it. 
I see your gastronomic fervor 
Is called a liberty preserver; 
It eats a bushel big of livers 
Whereat the Constitution shivers. 



76 



1 



n 



To consecrate your roasting volleys 

And 

Mckinley (black and blue). 
You seem to say I am a glutton 
Exceeding fond of Eastern mutton. 
If you propose your job to keep, 
You'd better think such things asleep. 
This studio air is getting rancid, 
Root's not the fellow that I fancied. 

ROOT. 
Oh hear me out, Benignant Purple, 
I'll make the Christian Mausers hurtle. 

McKINLEY. 
This cabinet council I adjourn, 
All words of rosy promise spurn. 
Who brings me Aguinaldo's head- 
Convincing proof that he is dead — 
Is heir apparent to my crown. 
Till Hanna bids me haul him down. 



77 



Chains of Republican Empire 

A century ago 

Men thought of kings as children's government, 

Irrevocably barred from modern shores; 

Safe plays for sickly nobles, cranium bent, 

Infatuate generals, filtered breeds of bores. 

That we should contemplate a king, 

The half our manhood bartering. 

Backward in time the new world fling. 

Hushing the song that free men sing. 

No child of this swelling continent 

Could have believed, could have achieved. 

Nor does the mass accept it now, 

'Tis but the rich man's vulgar vow. 

Made audibly. 

To yoke us like the ploughman's cow, 

To drive us on through time and space 

Like peasants on Italian soil, 

Like peasants robbed of soul and soil, 

The homeless shadows of the place 

They once possessed, they once caressed. 

And with obtuseness rivaling the dead 

We strap the yoke upon our bovine head. 



78 



A hundred years of uncrowned government 
Are but as yesterday within the span 
Whereon the struggle of the captive man 
To unthrone kings, worn, ages-spent, 
Records his groveling since time began. 
And his success, so mean, so tentative, 
So late fulfilled, in poor imperative. 
Upon the liquorish putty of his mind 
Makes no more memory than wings on air, 
And he remains as apish, ancient, blind, 
As his arboreal ancestors, 
Too young to care. 

Empire is still our natural state, 

As screams and creeping to the child. 

As prey to beast famished and wild — 

And this is what we mean by Fate. 

But children grow, and some have crossed the line 

Where screams and kings seem natural and fine; 

Yet most grown men are balanced on the fence, 

Ev'n less discerning whither than whence. 

The gift of freedom handed them 

By generations lost in night, 

Is like the wealth of gilded wight, 

An everlasting diadem 

That reckless hand cannot exhaust. 

That even by fools cannot be lost. 

They fancy this. 

'Is not our freedom fixed and firm?' 

They ask, with laughter loose and free; 

'Is not in us the only germ 

Of sacred, self-made liberty?' 



79 



No, for in will you are infirm, 

You yield and give, you do not see 

That presidents may still be kings 

Through forms once held in infamy. 

Forms are as thongs which bind the ruler down, 

But neither form nor thong, 

How beautiful or strong, 

Acts of itself unguidedly 

In automatic stead of brain and brawn; 

And we have lost our pristine enmity for wrong 

And idly hope the thongs will work and walk. 

Doing their duty while we lag and talk. 

We learned our thoughts on human rule 
From bandit empires far amain; 
From England^ stain incarnadine 
On even Europe's bloody sheen, 
Where unobstructed customs reign 
The ancient birth of slave and fool. 
And if the people least relax 
Their fiery care of right and law, 
These forms subserve the tyrant's role, 
And what of right and justice lacks 
For gaining of th' imperial goal. 
He takes from legal form and haw. 
In name alone republican. 

We never contemplated wealth 

Transferred from all to several, 

We never dreamed a nation's health 

Could long survive this wily ill. 

To the low frozen social state. 

The barren soil of brutes and kings, , 

We now return degenerate, 

80 



I 



4 



i 



A nation sunk to underlings. 

On people dead to solemn rights, 

To what is theirs through force of toil, 

The curse of slavery re-alights 

And dying kingship will recoil. 

Imagine not in broad contempt of truth 

That we above senility are raised, 

Emblazoning the muscle-marks of youth 

To prove our mental strength is rightly praised. 

For in the land we brag above the skies, 

Enraptured that it is of chiseled rock. 

There grows and grows a lower human breed. 

That beastlier form of impure human stock, 

Which in all lands seems destined still to rise 

And cloud the dawning sun on heaven's face — 

Which to the wise is this enchanted globe 

Whenever the curse of dominant brute is laid — 

Just at the moment when the riper grace 

Of those who love and think would rend the robe 

And show us to ourselves, and show this ball 

Unfrocked of those, half man, half animal. 

Whose not yet human hopes, to power and wealth 

confined, 
Absorb insatiably the human all. 

This semi-type of brute. 

The wealth-devourers of our race, 

The sateless gourmands of the meek 

And inarticulate denizens 

Of envied unowned space, 

A-tremxble for the good they seek 

In piping timid orisons, 



81 



Lest by the rude and undersized 

It be contemptuously despised; 

The dispossessed of confidence 

In even fheir right to common sense; 

Quaking the while they pray to God, 

Knowing that prayer is whispered fraud 

While all innate capacities 

Of earth and nature, force and skies. 

Belong by right of pen and sword. 

Of vapory antiquated word, 

Of parchment, law and constitution, 

Crime and swifter absolution, 

Church, morality and science, 

Song and teaching and self-reliance, 

To those but one-half man^ — 

This type of semi-brutes 

Stands stubborn guardian of the blood-drenched 

past. 
Its deadly grip on further progress fast. 
In all things all-omnipotent 
Because its shrewd possession of 
The springs from which life flows. 
The wealth in waich life rose 
To that degree of leisured thought. 
To that possession of repose 
Which gave the soul its impetus. 
Which raised it from the fear and fuss 
Of vanquishing unsleeping foes 
To gain a modicum of food, 
Beyond it to conceive of naught, — 
Remands the comelier of mankind. 
Those more indubitably man, 
Back to the state from which they came, 

82 



The bitter struggle without vent, 

The search for simple nourishment, 

The sad imbruting prison game 

Of lifting stones through life's whole span. 

'Tis here we meet the mystery 

With fearful miracle replete, 

Th' illusion in the comelier kind, 

The lie they never have divined. 

The lie that life's fair heritage 

And increment from every age, 

May be detained in privacy 

And garnered everlastingly 

By those with rudimental soul, 

Incapable to know the whole 

Of the grand scheme of human things, 

In which man's sphered life gladly sings, 

When what is sacredly its own 

Is not in profligacy sown 

By robber fools with heart of stone. 



83 



There is Still Health in the 
Desert 



I. 

Why do these singular Boers humiliate 
England's crack general sports and liveried nobs, 
Buller, Gatacre, Kitchener, and, er, "Bobs," 
Forests of British soldiers, tons in weight 
Of golden British lubricating pounds, 
Convoyed in stately fleets by Justice steered. 
And a God and a half, as conscience-ballast, feared? 

II. 

England, the cowboy of the East and West, 
In whiskey soaked and sottish in its gold, 
With dirk and pistol in its boots and vest, 
And bullion nose both prominent and bold. 
Rides blusteringly to make a general round up 
Of human cattle in its annual pound up. 

With one eye gone, sans teeth, and minus crest. 
It hobbles disenchanted from the ground up. 

III. 
Tell us the cause, ye stars, ye gods, ye Boers, 
Of this amazed confounding circumstance. 
Where snorting snobs perform the pistol-dance 
Beneath the calm eye of the timely boors. 

It's worth a lifelong perigrination 

To learn the spell of this merry thin nation. 

84 



f 



IV. 
About three centuries ago or so, 
Miss England made a bargain with the Devil. 
Her soul was then not large enough to go 
About unchaperoned by saint or imp ill. 
Being by nature frisky and perverse 
She married herself in secret to the worse, 
On solemn promise she should speedily get her fill 
Of what is usually stuffed in a purse. 
She stipulated in the ceremony 
That her new spouse should coil his telling tail, 
Nor ever leap the tropic Stygian rail 
Except in decent garb of God or money. 
The Devil had no vanity about him 
When he could propagate his special doctrine; 
His Majesty therefore of course consented, 
And Mrs. England never has repented. 
He dressed himself like Christ without a sin, 
And lined the suit with gold and carnal vim. 

V. 

Since then the dame has known connubial blisses, 

Tho seldom taken for a married Mrs. 

Nor has she sued the Devil for divorce 

On grounds of ill support or of remorse. 

He ploughs the planet up to richly feed her, 

You'd think the cunning Fiend must surely need 

her 
To carry out his Eve and Eden crotchet. 
And have a deputy on earth to watch it. 

VI. 

With faithful wife's enthralled precocity 
Fair England copied all her Devil did. 
Even the Christ-clothes in which his claws were 
hid, 

85 



And scaled perfection with velocity. 
She learned to be a deuced pious robber 
And with Jesus-mask held up the Universe; 
To defend herself against a straggling curse 
Built a church and put a parson in to slobber. 

Went to hell upon a queenly visitation 
To inspect the Devil's educated wards; 
Found in hell a classic double population, 
Upper class of landed gentry and the lords, 
And a cultivated multipated mixture 
Of inventors of machinery and swords. 
These — I say it without bitterness or stricture. 
We must love the Devil and always speak him 

sweet, 
For it's rough to call the Devil names and hit him, 
Some dark midnight in an alley we may meet — 
These the highest classes were that hell affords. 
How the Devil had conceived a home to fit him. 
Studied England, virgin and discreet. 

VII. 
The machinery of Hades had a mission. 
Managed by the aristocracy of hell, 
To intensify the anguish and affliction 
Of the damned and under classes as they fell. 
And the beauty of this devil institution 
Maiden England studied lovingly and well. 
How the damned and fallen progeny of Adam, 
Fiercely burning in the everlasting fat. 
For the sin of contradicting those above 'em, 
Blew the bellows and pumped oil in the vat; 
Toiled and cooked themselves, and turned for ap- 
probation 
To the Demon owners of the hell-machine; J 

86 t 



^ 



Gladly felt the torture-fangs of dissolution 

If the owners watched them fry and heard them 

scream. 
And this bodied vision of her husband's dream 
The social art of this demonic scheme, 
Maiden England studied lovingly and well. 

VIII. 

With an inspiration nothing less than Christian, 
Sobered, solemned and a little archly aged. 
Having started for the damned a soup subscription, 
And the concentrated look of one that's saged. 
Soaring home upon His Highness gallant flipper. 
In such safety passing through the Dog and Dip- 
per, 
Set she then with diligence about applying 
The consummate secret she had learned in Hell — 
How to mould her people with the art of lying. 
And of mighty dividends to get a swell. 
With the skilled co-operation of the Master, 
With her avarice progressing ever faster, 
With oblique stupidity to ever last her. 
In the bloody sea of capital she cast her. 

IX. 

'Twas not long before the frisky froward virgin 
Had her azure island modeled as below. 
And the decent people in it most vergin' 
On the pathos and the salience of woe; 
Aristocracy benignantly a-scourgin' 
The Democracy to make the engines go. 

Far aloft, upon the smoke and curling hate, 
Sits the Devil, softly smiling, mixing Fate. 



87 



X. 

We'll leave him busy at his chemistry, 

For biologic question difficult, 

And geologic problem more occult 

Than stirring sour acids two or three. 

Our question is, what came of England's soul 

In these three hundred years of deviltry? 

'Twill need a very microscopic eye 

To find that thing in heaven, or hedge, or hole. 

Her soul, it died, and perpendicular fell 

Until it reached the upper crust of hell. 

Eternally expecting there to dwell, 

Kissed by its royal lover now and then — 

A virtuous wife knows seldom if or when. 

But I've a marv'lous wonder now to tell: 

The ugly little soul expired again! 

There died, that is, its more immortal puissance, 

And thus removed a universal nuisance. 

A soul quite normally can never die, 

But when it's festered through and through with 

lie 
Like England's, 'tneither has hell-fat to fry. 
Nor lucent elasticity to laugh 
And make hell's lower classes writhe and cry. 

XI. 
But garish England, courted by the Devil, 
Needed no soul, and was no moping rebel 
To that prophetic circumstance 
Which killed her conscience in advance. 
And left her body free to dance 
Upon the graves of all her sons 
Destroyed by merchantry or guns. 
Besides, the Devil filled her head with notions, 
Who formerly had fined her soul with potions: 

88 



A soul is a commodity 
Supercilious for you or me: 
Just look at hell, how well it thrives 
On other people's souls and wives. 
When I fell down from Heaven ejected, 
My soul by God like tooth extracted, 
'Twas thought by several in the Universe 
That I vvas then in a very petit hearse. 
But I've succeeded in my business 
And even troubled God with dizziness. 
I never knew real gratification 
Until that fortunate stratification 
Classed my soul and bouy apart 
And left my muscles without a heart. 

XII. 

Look at me, angel — devil, I mean, 

Pride of the Sages you have seen! 

Here in myself are concentrated 

Every good thing the ^ges fated! 

I am supreme, I am the dream, 

The absolute, infinite, perfect scheme, 

Grown from the forces that sway the spaces 

And keep the Universe in its traces. 

Give your imagination flight. 

Mount your fancy on stars and light; 

Stretch your mind on a bed of kites 

Fastened to Jupiter's satellites; 

Waft your thoughts to Saturn's bai. 

Catch her rings before you fall. 

If sap of science is in your make up 
Give it an Oxford champagne shake up; 
Bring your wits from hunting foxes 
To thinly think through college proxies. 

89 



Give your lords responsible places 

To fail in, with their mutton faces. 

For instance, let them go to sleep 

In the heart of an African Boer creep, 

Where scouts and sentinels are not needed 

Since "Bobs"e's brains were ne'er exceeded. 

You know that Low Dutch strategy 

A gartery Lord's too swell to see! 

Your brimming bourgeoisotic graces, 

Legacy from lower races. 

Relic of the nether spaces 

From which man emerged triumphant 

As a protoplasmic lump scant 

Of all the virtues in the brine 

But those of England's upper ten — 

They fabulously suck and swallow 

What others make and sadly mellow — 

Arouse to make you comprehend 

The devil's blessing I extend! 

If more is needed, take a dose 

Of English manners caught morose. 

Your wanton mind must be impounded. 

Of demon's thought to be surrounded; 

For one debauchery-bemuddled 

And gold-inebriation fuddled, 

Is difficult to stimulate 

Or mentally to impregnate. 

XIII. 

If your mighty cerebellum 's swelled to cracking. 
To discharge my vital spark there's nothing lack- 
ing. 

The secret that I now surrender, 

90 



Earth's and hell's consummate blender, 

Done by me and generated, 

Shall by you be venerated. 

Proudly, loudly I confess, 

I, the Devil, am Success! 

Where success exalted shimmers. 

In the mess my hissing simmers. 

And the potence of my magic. 

Which men estimate, as tragic. 

Is that where my soul existed 

Nature's flint is now encysted. 

In the cauldrons that I govern 

There is not a single love urn: 

Soul is love in flesh disporting. 

Brimstone murders Love in courting. 

True love never wore the dress 

Of the slattern named Success. 

To succeed you kill your lover, 

Soul and aspiration smother. 

Blossom out a cosmic Judas, 

Eared and evermore a crude ass. 

In this soulless, loveless essence. 

Have you Hell in punctured presence. 

As I said once on a time before in chattin' 
Upon a mountain with a Jew in Latin, 
The Kingdoms of the Earth shall be your dinner 
Now that your mummied soul can die no skinnier. 
Go to, and grab the Mongol, Black, and Bear, 
Success and hell attend you everywhere. 

XIV. 

For three good centuries old England throve 
Without a soul, and built a giant frame 



91 



Of property that, like the Bebel tovv^er, 

Rose up and interviewed the stars, and drove 

Her rivals mad with spite, making them cower 

Like paupered tramps before her bonded shame. 

All envied, hated and despised the beast, 

And prayed to God that they might share the feast. 

They knew that England was a bloated liar, 

And sought to bloat themselves as much or more, 

Thereby to swallow her, legs, ears and roar. 

And get themselves equipped to lie still higher. 

They quickly learned the art of lying. 

And on its windy bladders took to flying; 

But with their feelings were so deeply freighted, 

The bladders balked, and merely kicked and 

waited. 
Their pates of tow and crates of woe were puzzled. 
Their canine teeth and wallet jaws were muzzled. 
Witch England, far above them, lied and sailed; 
They lied below and tried again and failed. 
Till one exploded from behind his beer mug: 
'Farewell my soul, this is thy last fond dear hug!' 
Then threw his soul upon the shrinking ground 
And bladdered heavenward with a fearful bound. 
Each took his soul out of his breeches pocket 
As one would draw an eye out of its socket, 
And flung it hard upon a cruel rock 
To kill it dead and out of misery take it. 
To their astonishment it didn't break it, 
But the poor stone was shattered by the shock. 
Upward they soared to wend among the comets. 
As sick to see as one that virtue vomits. 



92 



XV. 

The good dame England had a mighty offspring 

whose 
Papa was said to be one Washington. 
Its homely habits and gigantic thews 
And cunning pertinacity to choose 
Good company — itself — and always shun 
The fireside hearth where ma and devil chatted, 
Finding in their concupiscence and wooings 
No source of family pride or filial fun; 
Tho seeing its mother daily grow more fatted 
With money, devil-furnished by the ton, 
Was still too young to comprehend her doings . 
Such orgies had this English she at home 
With her dark subterranean paramour. 
That on one noted Eighteenth Century morn 
The youth got up and sailed beyond the bourne 
Which islands England in, resolved to roam 
Free and aloof, on virgin mount and moor. 
And the disgracing brothel to forget, 
From which sun, soul, and love, and honor, had 

set. 
Had you then journeyed down the trembling sea 
To look upon the promise of that youth. 
You must have felt the inarticulate thrill 
Of some new faintly whispering truth 
By the great universe conceived, 
An effort of the deeply sleeping will 
To rouse itself from its impotency. 
And then inconsolate you would have grieved. 

XVI. 
For when this hopeful boy to manhood mounted. 
And European slaves expectant throbbed 



93 



For glad fulfillment of that giant promise 

To break the nations' chains with sledge of truth, 

Inaugurating something due the sun 

And owed the moon in gratitude for shining, 

In payment for the patient light they've shed 

Through aeons so interminably long, 

That star-dust man might sprout, and grow, and 

bud, 
And be that fabulously perfect thing 
For which the teeming milky way had toiled 
And grass had grown and the fair sea moaned — 
Then what did he but turn a somersault 
And kick his early morals to the devil, 
Behaving with such transcendental fault 
That he convinced the sage whose heads v/ere level 
That Satan was the fellow's actual sire, — 
Together with the virgin weird and dire; 
That he was gotten in a carnal sin 
When England let by night the devil in. 
For on what other doctrine hypothetic 
Could his debauchery and doings hypocritic 
Be sanctioned by hereditary laws. 
Unless descended from the chap with claws? 
He played the devil's undisputed pranks 
With such- agility with his long shanks I 

As but blue-blooded fiends could hope to rival; I 

Mere mortals in the art would droop and drivel. 

XVII. f 

He practised with a devil-borrowed shrewdness 
The motions of his mother's sorry lewdness. 
Dressed as a saint, with Bible for a bludg 
Went over all the planet sleekly trudgin', 
The colored piccaninnies sharply nudgin' 



i 

* 



Dressed as a saint, with Bible for a bludgeon, 
Went over all the planet sleekly trudgin'. 



94 



To get excuse to throw 'em in a dudgeon. 

Then if they cried and scratched and hit him back, 

At once he put 'em in his carpet-sack, 

In ribaldry yclept his market sack — 

Like mama England with her billion niggers, 

'Mong whom the starving Hindu dimly figgers. 

Who robs one continent of food and rubies 

Wherewith to spank South African Dutch boobies — 

Upon the fiend-fires of assimilation 

Burned up each rubbishy and lesser nation. 

And then sailed home to dance and drink and pray, 

Until another henroost came his way. 

XVIII. 
A prouder father never was than Satan, 
Whose blood with England's mixed made such a 

great 'un. 
That England was not far from Devil removed 
In blood and natural substance, thus was proved; 
For only species similar are fertile, 
Others most ruthlessly the offspring curtail. 
An ape and cow, for instance, lack affinity 
Like England's and the Devil's consanguinity. 
Yet like the mule, with Devil's Sam 't may happen 
There'll be no second generation gotten. 
Not as a certain family of Jukes, 
Whose business is to multiply the spooks. 
The near relationship of Greeks and Gods 
Their progeny attested 'gainst some odds; 
Tho with the ancient devils they sometimes flirted. 
Nothing like Uncle Sam was thence concerted. 

XIX. 

So went events until a certain season 

When England howled against the Devil treason. 



95 



For in the climax of the mighty stir 

Which she had made to steal some populations — 

The highest transports of her love relations — 

The arch fiend seemed to have deserted her. 

The simple fact was, miracle to most, 

A few mere herders in a distant desert 

Displayed more wit than all her titled inert 

Generals, incalculable host 

Of soldiers, and her cannon backed by pelf 

Stol'n from the world by England's Law of Self. 

This was too much — for equanimity — 
And England sent Lord Kitchener to hell 
To bring her husband up to earth pell mell. 
Who only brought from His Sublimity — 
Yawning upon a superheated cauldron 
Which his vast limbs lay stretched out supine on. 
In which the British soldiers lately dead 
Consumed immortally, a devil's bed 
Whose feathers, human flesh and bone. 
Some thousand imps poured boiling oil on — 
These words, spoken in surly English tone: 

XX. 

Go tell the woman who demands my presence, 
That, having earth's whole structure much be- 

fussed. 
Enjoy the consequences now she must. 
I made a couple of miscalculations 
In my United Kingdom recreations. 
First, was the limitation of my travels. 
One like myself brought up to have hell's 
Aerial messengers to bring him news. 
Is sometimes over-hasty in his views. 



96 



n 



1 
1 



The place Transvaal I wholly overlooked, 
Hence all my calculations overcooked. 
My studies were in youth somewhat neglected; 
I always thought South Africa infected 
With men of Ethiopic form and feature, 
Or even smaller pigmy apish creature. 
I thought mankind divided in two lots: 
Liars and thieves like you, financial sots, 
Including Philippine Sam and all of Europe, 
And every civilized sinner from the boor up. 
The other lot I briefly called wild niggers, 
Particularly adapted breakfast food for triggers. 
That there survived a stock of independence 
Outside the niggers, I doubted with a vengeance. 
And niggers, like the subjects of Khalifa, 
Run up the leaden jaws of cannon if a 
Tinned general appears, and die like deer, 
Tweaking the Creusot cannon with a spear. 

XXI. 
America no longer now obstructs 
The progress of enslaving usufructs. 
And may be medaled foremost foe of freedom. 
Addicted once to hear the weak and heed 'em. 

I knew that with my wealth and wiles I'd rotted 
The various modern virtues pruned and potted; 
That all the civilized and culture crammed 
Were crutched mechanical puppets I had damned; 
And that, with luxury and millionaires, 
Cowed poverty and greedy butcher snares, 
To trap the hunted remnants of the brave, 
All good was long since in the grave. 
So that it gave me quite a nervous shock 
When British troops got such a vital knock. 

97 



XXII. 

The world is not yet all by me dissected, 

Its sweetness have I not yet wholly sucked, 

Its spirit fruit not altogether plucked, 

A little manhood's somewhere resurrected. 

Go tell the stomachy dame that sent you here 

That I bethink me she has much to fear. 

For where both beer and bible fail to trouble. 

Where gin and civilization are but stubble. 

Where men have brains enough to scorn the dol- 
lar — 

A certain circumstance of mental squalor — 

Where they reject the pirate-plank monopoly 

And love their freedom more than hankered prop- 
erty, 

My wiles as devil fail. 

My lurid fires pale. 

My quirpish spirits quail, 

And like a slow hell-snail 

I quiver and crawl. 

Incontinent fall 

From earth's dome 

To my hell home. 

Here my ovens I fill 

To thaw me of the chill 

Of sitting in a wind 

Where people had not sinned. 

I mean I felt the blast 

Of manhood blowing past. 

Which more upsets my nerves 

Than all this hell-fire serves. 

With warm petroleum curves 



98 



And dead men's melting sigh, 
To straightly rectify. 
So I can't come 
To madam glum. 

The cold I have would hang on long 
If I should mount my motor-prong. 
You can't conceive the speed with which 
My bicycle tail begins to switch; 
It bangs me through the universe 
An orbit hourly or worse. 
The cosmic drafts I never mind 
If good companionship I find; 
'Tis only when I meet with dumb saints 
I'm taken with my old lung 'plaints. 
The earth was one of my oases, 
A golden frame for devil's graces, 
One restful spot in solemn spaces; 
Where nothing is, no wrong solaces. 
But now these dozen death-or-freedom Boers 
Have sent me here to doctors and hell's cures. 

XXIII. 

My second mistake your mistress may appreciate; 
My tendency to virtue's nerve depreciate. 
Altho I've hemorrhage and inflammation 
When men with daring soul invade my station, 
So few of these withstand the sugared butter 
I melt before them in a golden gutter, 
That I decided all were nincompoops. 
And came to treat them all as itching dupes; 
Itching for money, leadership or name. 
For pleasure, premiership or bloated fame. 



99 



iMira 



Could buy the whole set with a bauble shining, 
And set them murdering and bible-whining, 
By mention of a gold mine up in Sirius, 
Just scalable by damned war delirious. 
I know the various species of this itch. 
It seldom fails to operate. Lord Kitch. 
Canst blame me then all humans for despising 
And their few consciences for undersizing? 
Had I of Boers and liberty-or-death heard, 
Should have straightway their principles bribed 

deathward 
With promise of an audience with your queen, 
Kneebreeches on, and buckles, colored green. 
What burgher would not Freedom soothly cheat 
If he could lick Victoria's lovely feet? 
Or who for Liberty would shed his blood 
If he could crawl a day in royal mud? 

I learned this from the patriot Yankee States; 

There's not an unctuous patriot crude or swellish 

But would his principles devour with relish 

If served upon the Queen's reception plates. 

Digestion's found to be divine 

In company with royal swine; 

What easily dissolves a stone 

Can chylify a small backbone. 

I once defined a Yankee thus: 

A Freeman filled with British pus — 

You stick your pin beneath the skin. 

Which is a little century thin, 

And oozes out an English muss, 

You'\e nothing but an English cuss. 



100 



He sells his daughter to a rotten lord, 
The mass enrich him of their own accord. 
That millions he may send to English cad 
Ten thousand girls must turn to harlotry, 
Girls beautiful, in Freedom's imagery, 
Yet are they infinitely sad. 

I could not set the Boer above the Yankee, 

Who gives his daughters to me and says thank'ee. 

My purpose is to stay in hell till summer, 

To give my progeny on earth a chance 

My cause for their self-interest to advance, 

And turn the Boer into a tramp and bummer. 

My compliments to your reputed Miss, 

May she kill many and experience bliss. 

XXIV. 

Lord Culinary paddled home to light, 

And told his mistress all as was dight. 

The story is — I think it not — she swore! 

And screamed, Hell's fires I'll quench with gore! 

As she lay foaming on the satin rug, 

A postscript came from hell by lightning fire-bug. 

It read as follows: Sweet my own, 

In drink and epilepsy grown. 

Take heart and take a million pounds 

And go your educating rounds. 

As once we lay on lily bed 

I what you thought was silly said; 

Said, 'I the devil am success;' 

Tho something more, am nothing less. 

The Boers, uncommonly malicious, 

Are not commonly avaricious. 



101 



Success to them's a picayune, 
To you and all, earth's only boon. 
That 's why you can't succeed to lick 'em. 
Your crude molasses will not stick 'em. 
Take my advice and but refine it. 
With education surface-shine it. 
And they may leave their windy valleys 
And go to school to windy sallies. 
They may, by studying the Greeks, 
Become most cultivated sneaks. 
With Latinized curriculum 
And Lofty Caesar tickle 'em. 
Familiarized with ancient muck-cess. 
You may entice to modern success. 
O Love, believe my proverb-thunder, 
Educate whom you would plunder. 

XXV. 

Down in hell the devil leered. 

Countenance besmeared and bleared; 

To himself thus cogitated, 

Hate and appetite o'er sated: 

Does this old English beast carnivorous 

Imagine from our destined bent to shiver us? 

We manufacture universal woe. 

With dragnet of success I deftly tow 

All humankind to gnashing poisoned sorrow. 

More matchless woe tomorrow and tomorrow. 

Hence, with this venomed bait success I've lured 

her, 
Adown the avenues to hell adjured her. 
Yet in my marital voluptuousness 
Said never once success is happiness; 



102 



4 



The fool's ambition had invented that 
Before I raised to her my thrice-cocked hat. 
My double purpose is to mock and damn her, 
While using her the Boers to mock and hammer. 
Tho from the fiend Success the Boer recoils, 
I'll cover him with British success-boils. 
But neither one of them shall understand, 
The shattering-rock of happiness I stand. 

XXVI. 
The Boer fights on, the English soldiers fall, 
While all the sons of liberty rejoice 
That daring' Freedom has again found voice, 
And in her mountains seems invulnerable. 
The tumor of the world, England, fights on; 
Her apoplectic visage, stretched and pale. 
Of viperish infamy the earthly paragon; 
The strength of empire now of no avail; 
Her glory in the balance wavering. 
Her senile prestige faintly quavering. 
And a new world-era in the dawn. 

XXVII. 
England reputed home of equal rights, 
Self-haloed as the despots' youthful David, 
By whose example all must mount the flights 
That lead to civic heaven, whose cobbled aisles 
Conduct the poor and rich to equal votes — 
God's special pearl in Anglo-Saxon isles. 
The hard-won right to utter in a box 
A wish the House of Lords thence-onward blocks, 
And those objecting shoots within the moats — 
For English liberty means you shall die 
If having voted and blown off your steam. 



, 103 



You cry, A vote is not a tinsel dream, 

To be dispelled and vetoed by the 'high,' 

Tho cast in conquering majority. 

The part of liberty, in British custom. 

Is to make people howl and vote, then bust 'em. 

The simple satisfaction of the howl 

Contents the vulgar and besmooths the scowl. 

The idea that a noble Britisher 

Should make his vote a lever to uplift 

The burden of the ages, kingly gift 

Of those who sit upon his back and purr, 

Is complicated; he prefers to smoke — 

(And batter heads of those who cry down war 

And cry up human freedom and the Boer). 

For empty abstract right to vote with paper. 

He cuts the most unprecedented caper: 

He cuts his very economic throat. 

By all the upper classes he is cut, 

He cuts his cloth and finds he has no coat. 

From all elected privilege is he shut, 

And finally warms himself in Potter's rut. 

For this bleak British liberty and feed, 

The vulgar British vote, and bleat, and bleed. 

XXVIII. 
After Lord Savagehash had left the synod. 
The devil lay reflecting on the sin odd 
Of sixteen Boers delaying Hell's progression 
And making all damnation hold a session. 
The more he thought, the bluer did he get. 
His flaming skin got absolutely wet. 
A feeling dangerously new to him 



104 



I 



Across his wrought-iron chest electrically swam. 

A shifting feeling of incertitude 

That if the neurasthenic brood 

Of humans hypnotized and mewed 

Should have the Boer struggle long before their 
eyes, 

It would said devil-hypnotism vial capsize. 

For well he knew the devil's power stands 

And shines, upon imaginary sands. 

The humans fear and reverently trust him, 

Which gives mesmeric potency to just him; 

And when they learn to think that he is weak, 

Tail sheathed, bray breathed, uncheeked, away 
he'll sneak. 

XXIX. 
The exudations from the hams of Atkins, 
And various other smells from heroes' fat skins 
Stuffed dnd expressed by England as a gift. 
At which he, mollified, now pecked and sniffed, 
Had made him reckless of the fragile tenure 
By which he rules the destinies of men or 
Of even women, tho they attend his churches, 
And occupy his prefatory perches, 
In preparation for their hell excursions 
When earth shall lose its charming last diversions 
Of gladiatorial trade and war 
And dodging Christ's stern neither, nor. 

He sat upright and said to General Lawton, 
Now quite a crony as the latest thought on 
The prudent art of prudence in a bog 
And civilization shooting though a fog: 



105 



I much commend the Yankee bent 
Of giving God a safety scent, 
That when the critical moment comes 
Religion solves political sums. 
It 's just the same except in name 
Which fiend you trust and which you blame; 
Trust me and you'll the devil see, 
Trust God and you'll the devil be. 
This God when under a physical strain 
Reveals the Devil's phthisical brain. 
The Yankee's speculative mould 
Made use of God, England, of gold. 
The Yankee crows and England quails, 
Who God-wind sows shall fill his sails. 
But whether he sows to God or me 
The harvest is my classical fee. 

XXX. 

The devil, leaving Lawton sore confused. 

Strolled solemnly away and mused: 

All England and all hell before the Boer 

Bow down, compelled and poor. 

They volley their red flames of sinuous death 

In vain, and launch their poisoned shibboleth 

To see it whistle home again, 

A devastating boomerang, 

Their own arms breaking with an anvil clang. 

Because the Boer is not yet dead within. 

Not yet, like England, pickled wealth in sin. 

His soul still beats immaculately strong. 

While that survives, ev'n hell may thunder long 

Its huge bombardment of atrocious deeds, 

And victory flutter far from its damned creeds. 



106 



I 



Mankind, perceiving this, will spurn my yoke. 
Tyrants like England, presidents, kings and 

thieves, 
Who feast on men as parasites on leaves, 
They'll spring triumphantly upon and choke, 
Completing the vast cycle of their slavery, 
And in that act of vanquishing deliverance 
Go free of sin — my mesmerizing influence — 
And in one blow destroy me and my knavery. 
I shudder! Are not these seeds of revolution? 
I see the bloody knife of Anarchy! 
Men sometimes kill in order to be free! 
To kill is murder, murder 's sin! Confusion! 
Is not sin sin, tho done to vanquish sin? 
Shall earth grow sinless through a sinful sin? 
More woeful would this be than all iniquity! 
You must use kindness with a grizzly bear, 
A sinful club to use would not be fair. 
And this applies delightfully to sin and me. 
To use a sin to kill a sin, and live. 
Is more obnoxious to— hem, — me, than bible. 
Men may all die, but must not practise evil! 
Life, is a worthless little thing to give! 

XXXI. 
This doctrine's perfect, now I must apply it; 
When virtue chains itself I do defy it. 
You must not sin to bring millenium in; 
A sin is, well, whatever sin has been. 
Once make it sin to fight superior force 
And you may talk of freedom till you're hoarse. 
Your duty then's to wait till tyrant power 
Gets tired and good, and ceases to devour. 



107 



Resist with force and you're a cursed criminal, 
They kill you and their crime is versed in hymnal. 
This is the collar which the good have fitted 
Upon themselves: think you they're to be pitied? 
I'll show this shining thought to mother England, 
And all the rest will copy from that wing'd land. 
But simple looking Sam don't need to learn it; 
He simply had to stir his blood and yearn it. 

The good are thus my coadjutors, 

I'll make them all my plenary tutors. 

To them I'll intrust the difficult art 

Of teaching the world we must not part. 

They must never use force to drive me out, 

Force would be wickedness, undevout; 

But I can use force to keep me in, 

Force against my force would be sin. 

When I of my free untrammeled will 

Make up my mind no more to kill, 

And give up the world of my own accord. 

The millenium will have probably roared. 

It rests with me to blow the horn. 

For morally none may wake the morn, 

But when I do it, and crack my doom. 

Good Lord, my mind will have scaled the flume! 

It happens, a devil's mind can't crack. 
So the world for ever'll be on the rack. 

XXXII. 

The devil now prepared to stroll 

To his happy orthodox Anglican goal. 

Folded his flannels in his dressing case, 

Shaved well his tail and freshly ground the point, 



108 



Fell far in Asia at an opium joint, 

Rebounded thence to Africa with grace. 

Here, as a school girl with her well-thumb'd 

books, 
He studied everything that makes a Boer, 
Cornelian woman and the men that woo 'er. 
Sped thence away, affrighted at their looks. 
And to his hundred millionth wife thus spake: 
inou sunbeam mellowing a distant apple, 
Thou match that teachest fire and air to grapple. 
Thou duck that bellowest for thy Drake 
And wouldst throw Buller in a fiery lake. 
Thou bug that sittest on the sun's exterior 
To hide the light from everything inferior. 
And sweetly says. Be not for this the drearier. 
Thou woman then, so full of spleen and malice. 
That I would rather lose thee from my pipe 
Than quaff the odor of thy garnet flesh. 
And have thee muddy up hell's limpid chalice 
Of simple blood with thine incontinent juice 
Of all deflections from the normal in thy vice, — 
Thy sphere as I foresaw in drunken dream 
Infallible, is earth, stay here supreme. 
Conduct damnation here, make converts ripe 
To drop expectant in the foremost sluice 
That sweeps across the unfathomable all 
To my proud fall! But enter not hell's close. 
For thine insatiable female wish 
To be distinguished as supremely damned, 
And from the Matterhorn of matchless woe 
To look compassionately down on those 
Who suffer less, and cry in anguished scorn 



109 



And jealous triumph over all thy mates, 

"My sin and suffering surpasses thine!" 

Shall be confirmed. 

Thou Shalt stay glooming here, but not without 

conditions. 
Attend the voice of thy diurnal magistrate, 
Indulgent with the mystery of thy future missions, 
As first it doth impartially disseminate 
A picture of thyself and tny degenerate 
Land unburned. 

XXXIII. 

I've been to Africa a-slumming. 
To get material for Extension lectures; 
A college settlement I think of plumming. 
And had to learn the natives' gestures. 

In the wide desert still is fragrant health. 

Men are not dapper phantom clerks, 

Performing counter-jumper smirks. 

Scared echoes of employers' jerks, 

Without a phantom rood or stone 

That honorably is their own. 

They are not battlemented collars 

Like airy peaks of Alpine ice 

Inviolably white and nice. 

The work of laundry-ladies' scholars. 

They are not town degenerates, 

But are the eagle's mountain mates, 

Whose aerie is the wilderness. 

The stars their everlasting dress, 

At home in evil tempered night. 

Cool sorcerers in storm and fright. 



110 



1 



'Tis whispered that they eat with knives, 
Yet can they be as gods in battle; 
They neither napkins use nor tattle, 
Yet dare they well protect their lives. 

XXXIV. 
I'd like to see a big ungainly Boer 
Behind the counter of an English store. 
Discussing sugar at so much an ounce 
And mastering the last commercial pounce. 
I'd like ev'n more to see him as a student, 
Becoming daily deep and thin and prudent; 
Say, learning at the feet of Doctor Schurman 
To be the president's waiter and a pure man. 
We've now at schools the branch diplomacy. 
To teach us legally to roam a sea 
As pirates, but without conspiracy; 
To fast enchain the free and leave 'em free. 
This document the Boers shall next examine. 
To pass in victories without much crammin'. 
To wash the sunny starch out of their sinews 
They must in classes fish for moral minnows. 
X stands for obligation^ and XY 
The sanction carries and the reason why. 
But what you are to do, and when, and how. 
Will be discussed in heaven, not now. 
While here enjoy your sense of obligation. 
And be yourself contented with flirtation. 

Pursue your moral studies with a view 
To be professor of a chosen few; 
To walk in metaphysic adumbration 
And let your conduct go in, hum, vibration; 



111 



To hoard your energy in college shades 

And help the vulgar horde proceed to Had'es. 

Eschew unpopularity Hebraic, 

Soul-science ethic is to cure an ache; 

Fawn on the Carnegies and Rockefellers 

To teach sweet reason to the rocky sellers. 

What is the purpose of Professor Fudge 

If not to make the rich man's pocket budge? 

There's Wellesley now, the school of innocent girls. 

Opens its mouth for Rockefeller pearls; 

Its faculty, with morals ripe tattoed, 

Decides a giver 's not to be tabooed. 

It has a solemn war dance in a meeting. 

And votes that John got rich 'ithout cheating. 

Here, wife, 's my introduction and tuition 

To Wellesley, for you to ta^e a course in fishin'. 

The wimmin there dispense the blood of Christ 

With dying poor men's blood stirred up and sliced. 

Tell your Miss President What's-her-Christian- 

name 
I sent you; she'll delightedly exclaim. 
Take this tender billet-doux to Wellesley, 
Safe and sound forever now in Hell's lee: 

'Keep your skins and cuffs immaculately white. 
And protect yourselves with treatises on right; 
Send the under class to bivouac and fight, 
Pay the tailor bills of God in full at sight.' 

XXXV. 
One height must be assailed with solemn wing 
Before the Boer can sycophantly sing: 
That is the time-crowned House of Parliament, 



112 



The ins and outs and underneaths and scent 
Of which he must know better than the dog 
That knows his friends by smelling of "the log. 
Here England's favored upper classes meet 
To fashion sacraments that garnish cheat. 
Here is the transformation deftly wrought 
Of boiling dowii the general will to naught. 
Here climb the cunning acrobats of fortune, 
On laws that are Democracy's abortion. 
The people swear that while the Commons sit 
And gaseous odors steamingly emit, 
Decoctions savory of its own sweet wishes — 
That they, the people! get the loaves and fishes. 
The Commons legislate the things that suit 'em. 
And next day loudly over England toot 'em 
As laws enacted by the godlike people, 
Tho made by them alone up in a steeple. 
People so anodyned and ballot-dinned. 
Men are not, but are horned and finned. 

The best prescription known for cure of manhood 
Is attendance at this Central Union School, 
Where the students study pockets they may cram 

good 
While the nation takes diploma for a fool. 

Of these arts they know but little in the desert. 
That is why they grow such mighty muscles there. 
Drag them into pumps and swallow-tails and des- 
sert. 
Let Delilah cut the Samson's golden hair. 



113 



XXXVI. 

England, thou art an age behind the times, 

Altho behind thee is an age of crimes. 

Thou canst not be a troglodyte 

And lord it o'er eternal right; 

Thou canst not fight with flints and stones 

And break the Almighty's cushioned bones. 

Must, if thou wilt the truth enchain, 

Discard thy crumb'd Silurian brain. 

Take now thy choice, be just and die 

Of ennui, far removed from gore, 

Thy realm no reeking slaughter-house. 

Thy poor no longer shrieking ghosts. 

Or dying on the battlefield 

To feed thy gorgon-boweled rich — 

This course to you is twenty hells, 

You corpse-grown smile the story tells. 

The other way is modern, up to date — 

Comprised in one vast title — Educate. 
XXXVII. 

Abandon the system which starves out your 
masses. 

The proceeds of labor distribute with fairness; 

Dissolve and extinguish the infamous classes. 

The robbers who curse all the others with bare- 
ness. 

Can you tell me, my dolt with catapult nostril, 
How the masses can ever raise spirit for fighting, 
When spirit in them is a dry desert lost rill 
Of wretches who spend half their days no food 
biting? 



114 



You can't make a batt'ring ram out of your head 
If millions that make you, skim bread from the 

gutter; 
You can't be a famous composer of lead 
If your masses their black curse of hate on you 

mutter. 

You fool, can you feed your high upper class ulcer 

And keep your low arms strong for war and de- 
fence? 

Can your ladyship chastise the boor that insults 
her. 

While freezing her bowels with class reverence? 

Rob your workers, deprive them of hope and ambi- 
tion. 

Bloat your shirkers and stuff their bold bellies 
with all: 

When war comes, arm your shadows and pray 
with contrition. 

And ride with your stuffers to national fall. 

So unless you give ear to my other obsession. 

The hard ways of Justice you'll have to embrace; 

Your low ones make equal their lords of oppres- 
sion. 

Fill their minds and their bodies with strength 
and with grace. 

Your condors of capital drive to the Channel 
And drown them without a remorse or a tear; 
Then your nation will grow into strength that will 

ban hell. 
And the whole universe will exultingly fear. 

115 



Mind, I don't recommend this, sweet cowardly 

sloven. 
I show you the picture to make you recoil. 
'Tis my purpose to give your thick pate such a 

clubbin' 
That this deuced grand vista of earth you will foil. 

For you see very plainly that if this should hap- 
pen 

Your country'd no longer be hell's charming pal- 
ace; 

The blood of mankind you'd no longer be sappin'. 

From your realms I should pack my defeated val- 
ise. 

XXXVIII. 

I am now about to tell you 

Of a better way than that: 

How you rob the little people 

While you keep the richer fat; 

How you keep the masses slaving 

In the universal way 

And the robbers keep a-raving 

Of the universal ray 

Of the sun that's just arising 

In the Oriental East; 

And the food they're just apprising 

For an ornamental feast, 

Where the rich shall sit as usual 

At the tables and the plates, 

And the poor shall flit as ever 

Empty through the gorgeous gates, 

And believe that they have eaten 

Of the riches from the deep, 

As they sink with bodies beaten 

To their everlasting sleep. 

116 



XXXIX. 

If thou wilt be my brigadier in earnest, 
See that the latest tricks of Sam thou learnest. 
Your population is composed of noodles 
Presided over by some lords and boodles. 
The boodled lords are fools that cannot lead, 
The people dunces, that can only bleed. 
When stood against a man or two with guns 
Your whole creation wobbles round and runs. 
I tell you, ancient cow with parched udders; 
The world has left behi'nd your breed of cudders; 
Turn off your belly-pated lords and boodlers 
Or your tough flesh is canned for Yankee Dood- 

lers. 
Sam's snappy tricks outnumber yours by several, 
If you raise felons on your head you never'll 
Have strength within your legs to beat that clever 

sell. 

XL.. 

You must, I hate to say it cursed spouse. 
You topsails cut and in the water souse. 
To beat the devil with the devil's tricks 
You know's a proverb, which I deem prolix, 
But find most pointed when applied to God. 
I roll the Lord beneath the rumbling sod 
By beating him with his own fumbling rod. 
I take his virtues out of his own mouth. 
And leave him famishing in a moral drouth. 
That is, the latest virtue he evolves 
I make my own, and neatly make it solve 
My trouble — how to let God exercise. 
And keep as ever mine the earthly prize. 



117 



If God 's allowed to stretch his moral muscles, 
He struts around and swings his arms and bus- 
tles 
And starts a twig of goodness here and there, 
And says, In fifteen centuries this will bear 
A moral fig, for which mankind will bless me 
And cry, how sad the universe would be, less Me. 
He is a God that dearly loves to loafe^ — 
He'll waste an age reclining with an oaf — 
And leave the world to my complete possessing, 
If I do always what I'm now confessing. 

XLI, 

He has in every century or three 
A sudden stroke of moral epilepsy; 
And then must belch and roll in ethical raving, 
And recover himself by giving the world a saving. 
In these wild times of electro-mystical rabies. 
One might suppose God liable to nab 'is 
Most mortal enemies, sin and me, and grab 'is 
Poor earth and bear it away from the Devil's grav- 
ing. 
And he might, if I then resisted his delirium 
And applied my usual vice to men to leery 'em. 
Not I! I know too much to make God stubborn: 
How is it kings and politicians suborn 
The glowering mass when it's really in a rage 
And demanding a fifth of a right in its mad ram- 
page? 
I taught 'em the trick when the world primarily 

squeaked. 
And the first conception of right from heaven 

leaked. 
The rulers pretend to blow in the popular quarter, 



118 



1 



And give 'em, instead of a fifth, a tenth of a quar- 
ter. 

A fortieth part of a right they wisely concede 'em, 

And afterwards forty times faster continue to bleed 
'em. 

Now this is the measure I practise upon the Al- 
mighty 

Whenever his period comes to be morally flighty. 

I seem, like the college professor and ethical 
preacher. 

To be on God's side, and like them a prophetical 
screecher. 

I further his projects as ladies who visit the slums. 

Or political scientists closely examining scums. 

God like this, and says I'm a gentleman well-bred 
and learn'd, 

A personage safe to entrust with a worm that has 
turned. 

In delight he forgets it's his duty to foam some- 
what longer, 

And confesses he feels in his legs and his head 
somewhat stronger. 

I mistook you, he says to me tenderly, giving his 
sceptre. 

The keys of the earth I deliver to you, having 
swept her 

Of several extensive old sin-webs and even a 
spider ; 

With your care will this sweeping for twelve gen- 
erations abide her. 

Implanting a kiss of respect on my seal-colored 
cheek. 

He flies to his damsels, confiding mankind to my 
beak. 



119 



XLII. 

The Lord, Mother England, has recently dropt in 

a fit. 
The lord and the boodler, he says with decision, 

must git. 
Just humor him now and apparently give 'em their 

conge; 
There's more than one way the mudsill population 

to sponge, eh? 
As I've said several times. Uncle Sam has deliv- 
ered the hint. 
And no fiend can suspect that his stomach and 

heart are not flint. 
Your Oxford and Cambridge stupidities old are ef- 
fete, 
Found colleges new, to present the new mass a 

fresh teat. 
The herd has discovered it owns a projection 

called brain; 
Our trump is to give them a chance this confection 

to train. 
Then let those who scale the toplofty Parnassus of 

science 
Enjoy luscious fruits, for their self-sacrifice and 

appliance. 
Let feeders on those precious fruits be the pick of 

the mass, 
And the rest v/ill imagine the blessings stream 

down on their class. 
They'll willingly, then, be the slaves of their lucky 

elect — 
We'll kingship, and boodlers, and privilege, then 

resurrect. 



120 



The elect will with lords and monopolists divvy 
the pot, 

Thus connecting themselves with antiquity, not 
to say rot. 

The people, in gratitude-vinegar softened, ap- 
peased, 

Will starve and obey, until God with another fit's 
seized. 



On the brow of Spionkop 
Where the British lost their top skins, 
Throw the people down a sop, 
Plant a Harvard or Johns Hopkins. 

XLHI. 

I'm now in a word about to state 

The manner in hell we educate. 

Our principal aim is subtlety. 

The mother of mental adultery. 

We fill the mind with so many perceptions. 

It hasn't a corner for moral reflections. 

The more ways you think on a given subject, 

In four ways you see that life has no object; 

A little more learning makes six of four, 

The doctor's degree gives sixteen more. 

You get so deep that you go to sleep, 

And the harvest of learning I briefly reap. 

A student hedged with a million ifs 

Has no occasion for earthly tiffs 

With an old wrong here and a new one there. 

To him all 's equally black and fair. 



121 



His mind takes in both good and bad, 

The thing it cannot abide 's a fad. 

A fad 's whatever leads to action, 

And action always leads to faction. 

Within the All there are no rooms 

For faction, and the mind that plumes 

Itself on taking in the all 

Would such a fallacy forestall. 

A faction 's always partly wrong: 

A subtle mind would be despised 

To help a cause in one respect 

Deflecting from the absolute. 

It finds itself in sea of bliss 

For where it swims the goal 'twill miss, 

And ultimately proudly drown. 

In life's blank current undermown. 
It wisely will not swim at all 
Or waste its nobleness and ball, 
Against the things beyond its reach 
It will not raise its arm or preach. 

XLIV. 
Such bliss, O lordly equal scholar. 
You feel, and neither fight nor holler. 
You muse upon th' eternal breast, 
On earth you take eternal rest. 
Why should you fight a curse primeval? 
You're paid to study all prime evil. 
You diagnose a<nd synopsize 
And cures abhorrently despise. 
You, and the doctor theologic. 
With God all good and curing lodge, hie! 
And in your drunk indifference 



122 



Kick life beyond the funeral fence. 

You and the feed and fat physician 

Hold vulgar curing in derision. 

If you can cut a stomach out 

And see the patient walk about, 

You think you are God's birds of glory, 

And can't abide the worms that worry 

About the scientific hashes 

Your knives administered with gashes. 

Why should a person want a stomach 

If he can be a monument 

Of doctors' vast sagacity 

And flesh's vast felicity 

At being cut and living through it. 

And living briefly but to rue it — 

His soul intrinsically awed, 

His flesh incinerately sawed? 

So you, with firm celestial poise. 

Float motionless aloft, 

Impregnable to human woe, 

If you can score a novel thought 

In your elect philosophy. 

To struggle being ever wrong, 

What cause was ever worthy of 

The sacrifice which fathered it 

When faction fought and made it strong? 

You are my son, O learned man, 
You comprehend th' infernal plan. 
You are the corporal of my guard 
The planet's progress to retard. 



123 



XLV. 

You seem so wise and willing 

That people take you at your billing; 

O'erawed by you at cosmos-hulling 

They can't believe that you are gulling. 

And why they don't detect your fraud, 

You educated alloyed God, 

Is this: they think that education 

Is intestinal divination — 

The intercourse of God to males 

Through chicken chines and cows' entrails. 

For in the mind of Populace 

The gibbering priest has lost the race. 

Into his holy witchcraft shoes 

The holy educated scholar. 

Fresh from his institution-waller, 

Descends to gather in his dues 

And true believers more confuse. 

The magic of th' eternal book — 

It matters none what book or crook — 

Befogs the common ass forever, 

Nor will he from his asshood sever 

Himself, while the bell-wether ass. 

Vice-regent of fell nether ass, 

Derives his right to be a witch 

From institutions crass and rich. 

XLVI. 
Behold the formulaed professor 
Adore th' abnormal greed possessor! 
Behold the unctuous personage 



124 



Who steers the college in this age! 

Revolving round the millionaire 

And begging humbly for his share 

Of what the thief unhanged has stolen, 

A fraction of his booty swollen! 

Of all the boys who go to school 

To such a millionaire-assuager, 

The rich man's petit domo-major, 

Who is not knave, will be a fool. 

But so was matay an ancient priest 

Who twisted entrails in the East. 

The entrail-knave will play deceiver 

So long as there's a pay retriever — 

So long as people trust professors 

And follow the resonant bray of guessers. 

XLVII. 
Thou scented attribute of print, 
I'll give thee one strategic hint. 
Help not the world to grow some better. 
Do not thou wrench a single fetter. 
But teach it equanimity 
In witnessing its beauty ravished, 
Defaced by vandals who could be 
Restrained in their foul savagery, 
If those on whom mankind has lavished 
Its wealth of opportunity 
Were men, not creepers on the rich. 

For having helped me muzzle Jesus, 
In hell will none say that you freeze us. 



125 



XLVIII. 
It is not intended to make people happy, 
Culture would not do so mean a thing. 
The purpose is to make them weak and pappy, 
And to keep their brutish noses in the ring 
That was forged for them at first by howling can- 
non 
When their fathers' noble lives were shot away, 
When their race was brought beneath the heel of 

Mammon 
And to loving Jesus first was taught to pray. 
Look upon the curious creatures of the cities 
In the lands that Jesus Christ has longest swayed, 
Where the colleges have sung their learned ditties 
And professors been most liberally paid. 
There you see a bowed and creeping animalcule 
Whom the universe regards with blinding shame. 
Over whom the cultured rich and clammy 'ill rule 
Till the earthworms penetrate the culture game. 
These loathsome crawling ulcerated creatures, 
Emanating from the college culture spout, 
Are the highest specimens the culture preachers 
Have been able yet to sperm and bring about. 
Nor do any of them blench before the sewer 
Which arises in their sacred lecture rooms — 
Were the slummy population slightly fewer 
There would be less scrubbing education brooms. 
For the millionaire would harvest in less money 
Had he fewer city savages to rob, 
The professor's saintly life would be less sunny 
If the college lifted up the dying mob. 
Happiness is not the aim of solid culture: 
It's to keep intact the charnel status quo, 
While the lofty philanthropic learned vulture 
Feeds upo'n the bleeding vitals of the low. 

126 



XLIX. 

When you want wrongs defended that would make 

The sun ashamed to leave its molten bed, 

A gold mine droop its brazen eye, 

Silver regret its gleaming. 

And all diamonds pityingly strive 

To dim their jealousy-creating rays. 

Call on political economists. 

As soon as ploughing cannon have 

Distressed the crust on which an untamed race 

With haughtiness confers with heaven and leads 

Its independent life, 

Project a glorious faculty 

Of these economists to grill the land 

And have its generous undiscriminating soil 

Heaved into banks of mountain magnitude — 

Each mountain given to a foreigner — 

And plant upon its loamy slopes the seeds, 

Which, after generations of refined 

Attempt, bear still Ricardian crabs, that strike 

Nine-tenths of all their withered eaters dead. 

L. 
Under the spanking tutelage of these 
Long-armed ear-flapping mills of wind, the native, 
Nevermore to be a man, shall learn 
That evermove the magnet place 
To keep his eye is not on heaven, but in 
The pocket of the Zeus 

Who, in the latest press reports from Heaven — 
No one can vouch their truthfulness — has kicked 
His father Kronos out. 

This upstart Zeus who is the Millionaires — 
Kronos, poor dog, his credit lost, and Zeus 
Discharged that useless patriarch from the firm; — 

127 



Who kicked Jehovah out, and afterward 
Drove out the angels with a golden rod, 
And then assailed the modern God himself, 
The Christian God of mighty loveliness 
Well-armed with lovely mightiness, 
Reported to be strident, strong, omnipotent, 
The firmanent and stars like dice assembled in 
His hand, and guiding the innumerable 
Host of thieves and things and powers that de- 
luge the space — 
And him they beat, and kicked him out, and on 
His bandy-legged throne set up their own 
Abominable and stinking thighs. In whose 
Deep pockets septic is the execution-cart 
For all unmillionair'd and common heads. 
The secretaries, scribes and messengers, 
Men-of-all-work and body-servants. 
Of these new Gods, are called Economists. 

LI. 

Altho I have a tail and horns 

My devilship abhors and scorns 

These formless human sausage skins, 

Expositors of dirks and duns, 

Who lie of this and lie of that 

To rdake their lies connect and pat; 

Mincing human meat and virtues 

To fill their skins and jaws with cur chews. 

I'm not inexorably squeamish. 

Nor in my ways exactly dreamish, 

But spider-web prevaricators 

Who are of poor men merry praters, 

Who glibly teach that poor men's feelings 

Are tough as dried potato peelings; 



128 



Who'll spin a yarn of theory 
To earn their bloody fee for aye, 
To prove a million men may die 
Quite justly, by just starving dry. 
That one in wealth may be a lubber 
And philanthropically blubber — 
If he desires — about the children 
Of those he killed to get his billion, 
I like not. 

I like an honest open fighter 
More than a back and secret smiter. 
An economic Pinkerton, 
Hiding identity and gun, 
Ingratiating his clammy carcass 
In every corner small and dark as 
His sooty soul, to overhear 
Some evidence that matters here 
Are right, and economically 
What th' Almighty comically 
Intended, — is for even serpent 
Like me, so mean that I'd repent. 

Send out at once to the grim Transvaal 

Economists, and a trim trance doll 

Called Robinson Crusoe, to show that whoso 

Eateth and drinketh enough, shall do so 

No more on the capitalists' arrival. 

Who cometh to bury, or starve and deprave all. 

LII. 

They're the modern missionary 
Who, with treatises and sherry, 
Soon'll induce the wandering Boers 
To whine to capital on all fours. 



129 



If syllogism, psychic fluxion, 
Fails, they'll have the satisfaction 
Of splitting with a bottle, hairs 
Which paid no heed to Gresham's prayers. 
Boer women, boldly marshaled, 
Male attired: — Alfred Marshall'd, 
Being with child of some old Adam 
Smith, or either Mill that's had 'em. 
Would put on petticoats again 
And play the economic hen; 
Straightway their country's woes forgetting 
Would lay their heads, to get a petting. 
Upon the lap of Rhodes, the Cecil 
Who tells them, leerically, peace'll 
Arrive when they have studied Malthus, 
And shall with him and Beit as pal buss. 

LIII. 

When education took the place of God 

A curious untold incident transpired. . 

The college presidents, wanting something fine 

Invited me officially to dine. 

And with them, as unbiased clown. 

To weigh the budding interests of the moon — 

And incidentally to talk a little 

About a man, his wife and little victual. 

I acquiesced with joy, and interfused 

Convivial spirit in their wine and wassail. 

I got them drunk and mesmerism-locked. 

Then sowed the thistle-thoughts that upward 

flocked 
From my department pedagogical. 
Which forms the highest doctorate of hell. 
When asked what's wrong with modern education, 
Reply, The Devil was at the Presidents' collation. 



130 



LIV. 
I made it a point, as they lay there drunk, 
To explain to them how to make Freedom flunk, 
By saying that people of high cultivation 
Would never engage in a Freedom gestation. 
A man of culture must not be rough 
To despots, tho they be exceedingly gruff. 
The art of light is to live in the dark 
If you can't light up with a ladylike sp9.rk. 
I mean, that to say we SHALL be free, 
Without — "Please, Sir," and "Pardon me," 
Would shock the nerves of a learned fellow 
And turn him anthropological yellow. 

The proper college should humbly strive 
Sweet reverence to keep alive. 
Reverence toward whatever's above, 
Elegance, office, political shove. 
Wealth, of course, in iis iron glove. 
Old things dead and bathed in love 
Which bathed on earth in a bath of blood 
And died in a rain of stones and mud — 
But now ascended to the eternal. 
Forgotten, reborn, returned, supernal. 

LV. 

The bony Boer hath mere Old Testament morals, 
Which seemeth for trumpery liberty to stimulate 

quarrels. 
Teach him to be a neo-Christian canting. 
To render Caesar all there is but ranting. 
To recognize the majesty of law 
And feel that all of it is justly our law, 
With care denying it is simply Power-law. 



131 



His brain, reduced to sacred legal charcoal, 
Will not refuse to give the regal shark all. 
Law, mounted on the forceful throne of Caesar, 
Destroys implacably the daring free, 
The erring who impertinently walk 
Apart from governmental chalk. 

The Boer must learn the law of non-resistance, 
Which no one honors with the very least sense 
Except as ether for the weak we murder 
And alabaster ointment for the sturdier. 

There is no pagan charm like law and order. 
You make the law you please, then order 
The population dumbly down to lie 
In ordered rows, and keep your laws or die. 

LVI. 
These darts of various wisdom well-selected 
Will guide you through earth, raping, hell-inflect- 
ed. 
When you've by heart the blessed catechism. 
You're booted well to straddle any cataclysm. 

We now have the phenomenon 

Of sin as Heaven's automaton. 

The moralist looks at sin and blinks it. 

The scientist smiles at sin and winks it, 

The publicist welcomes sin and prinks it, 

The religionist mixes it and drinks it, 

Th' economist hospitably links it 

To his seductive categories. 

Which dumbfound mythological stories 

Pertaining to gods or men or Sphinx, 

Provided that none of them ever thinks — 



132 



Sin in this company ages and worries — 
No longer looks any at sin and shrinks it. 

LVII. 
The fundamental principle of Hell's 
Construction still remains untold. 
By dint of deep initiation in my ways 
You're now prepared to take a wild descent, 
Not to the roof and ceiling of Below, 
But to Hell's frightful source and undertow. 
Take not on hearsay what I will repeat, 
But come with me to where th' foundations spring 
And all things suddenly break off. 
You'll then excogitate why Heaven's weak 
And pottering to sin. 

LVIH. 
As one who cleans a well, when th' rope divides, 
Falls straight, so dove they vertically down 
Through many dizzy ranges of celestial calves. 
Until the Devil touched the brakes. 
They now were at the outskirts of the All. 
The depths below revealed the dreadful quality 
Of infinitely far transparency. 
One looked, and saw, and ever farther saw. 
And gained in fierce exultancy 
Some vision from beneath to draw. 
In the wild reign of grandeur speck or flaw. 
To save the roaming brain from going mad — 
And in the end saw nothing. 
'Tis ghastly, England said, and yawned. 
Then pricking up her ears she said: 
What is this shaft upon which seems to rest 
The whole of everything, but which itself 
On nothing stands, suspended drearily 
Over a dizzy void? 

133 



I notice Hell, then Space containing worlds, 
Then Heaven, all resting on a broken beam 
Projecting downward in a sea of naught. 
'Tis interesting, quite, and breaks the laws 
I learned, or thought I learned, at school. 
Why does not all collapse and fall? 
My gown is rumpled by our flight! 
Can you explain this miracle? 

LIX. 

The Devil, smiling and suave, replied: 

This short and suddenly deceasing shaft 

Is Hell's ground principle, and on it rests 

As you remarked, the whole of everything. 

The essence of it is that those exhibiting 

More brains, are lifted up above the rest. 

Thenceforward to depress their former friends. 

This is, in truth, the inner substance of 

Almighty God, — I say it safely here — 

He rests on all and holds it solid down 

And never stirs himself to let it up. 

The last foundation of the whole, this shaft, 

Reclines on emptiness. 

Because this universal principle 

And all the curious things it bolsters up 

Are likewise frail and void, sustained by wind. 

On this slim tube not only rests the Universe 

And God, the memory of what is gone, 

The spirits of the dead and ashes of their joys, 

But from It I derive my mongrel power. 

For were it known by men how feeble force 
"Would upset all and hell disperse, 
Would overthrow the fairy fraudulent heaven 
To give the earth and space a life of beauty 

184 



Not emanating from my laboratory, 

It speedily v/ould be done, for mortals would arise 

To rend away the leaden yoke of hell. 

Th' All-Indolent himself fears this, 

For then his power would likewise end. 

Who plays and waits eternally. 

I therefore hold th' Almighty with a bit 

And run creation rather more than he. 

I might at any instant were he cranky, 

Knock out his prop, and drop him like a flunky 

To spend his time for ever in gyrations. 

He pays the penalty of laziness: 

He would not Work to give men's wrongs redress, 

But having destined 'em to wickedness 

Kept 'em pent up in Father Adam's gear. 

He should have stopped sin's inundations 

And put the universe on dry foundations. 

This all-upholding principle which I have shown 

Adopt more carefully, Miss Bull, to save your 
throne. 

Your meek and skim-milk under-class is getting 
rabid; 

It may demand the confiscations back 

Where loll your rich on feathers they have grab- 
bed 

LX. 

As peoples are compound of men and beasts, 
Those up above that rob, and those below, 
Whose heaven-implanted functions is to work 
And like submissive beasts be ever robbed, 
So shall there be henceforth two kinds of na- 
tions; 
The toiling sort, of nations lower class, despised, 

135 



And those interminably labored for, 

The chosen of the God that somewhere fills 

His nostrils with the contribution fat 

Of universities and pews. 

And this condition of the world shall be 

The work of guns and thinkers. 

Why do the giant masses dumbly eat 

Their grass, while their colossal strength 

Meanders stricken through the dazzled dust, 

The eyeless freighter of the flogging world? 

Because, my dear, they can not think. 

But in the reason why they do not think. 

Is well embalmed a mystery 

The most incalculably deep 

That ever dyed the pale earth crimson. 

By soothing fetters of necessity 

Anchored to the procession of the brutes, 

No mind of European lower class 

Could learn to play the instrument of thought. 

And so my devils had that world their way. 

With shrewdness deeper in the blighted States, 

They skim the masses of their native brains 

And leave below the fermentation scum 

To breed and breed, and toil, and toil, and spoil, 

While those emancipated from their groveling 

A function surgical assume. 

Thenceforth they manufacture fallacies 

To hold their brothers willing in the pit. 

This is the teeming mission I devolved 

On universities. They cultivate 

The well-skimmed mental muscle of the mass 

With such attuned chicanery. 

That it in very truth believes itself 



136 



Fulfilling duty to its soul, mankind, 

Ev'n to its undiscoverable God, 

When it performs the mire-stained destiny 

Of filthy beast and fouls the elsewise decent 

Earth by its bubonic tainting of tne air. 

England, thou canst not trample common folk 

Too much. They love it. 

The final skill is this: 

Of all the lesser peoples, like the Boers, 

The Hindus, Cubans, Philippines, 

Take those who are the brightest from the rest 

And give them higher place, emolument 

And dignity. Bribed by these honors and estates, 

Let them convince their trusting countrymen 

That foreign rule, your yoke, is for their good. 

Divide the citizens against themselves. 

But with such cunning that the many shall not 

know 
The foes they harbor in their traitor few. 
Then will the whole earth heave and swell 
Upon hell's basic principle. 

LXI. 

When England and the Devil returned to earth 

They found "Bobs" hunting for his reputation still 

With several hundred thousand Weary Atkinses, 

Among the rocks and rills of Africa. 

The Devil was displeased, but didn't show it, 

Tho his keen thoughts ran thus: 

This superannuated blossom 

Is sure unfit to be my main reliance 

Upon a planet but half civilized. 

Until my Christian doctrine more pervades 

And weakens, a keener blade's required. 

137 



That blade is Sunken Sam, and him I'll delegate 

To be my major-gfeneral Devil here, 

To act while I'm incorporating Venus 

Within th' Imperial system of my love. 

I cannot spend a longer lime on earth 

Without neglecting business above. 

I'll go at once to Sam and dress him up. 

He kissed his lady all so lovingly 
She might have doubted him begrudgingly, 
Had she one question of her full-orbed bright- 
ness — 
To Satan she a bull of abhorred triteness. 

Said he, before he left his frau. 
Your cup of bitterness is full: 
Give up the name of Johnny Bull, 
And call yourself Johanna Cow. 

LXII. 

Sam was as usual on a railroad train 

Addressing people on prosperity. 

With mourning weeds of a suff' ring island on 

The Devil first displayed himself to Sam, 

Pleading attention in the holy name 

Of bleeding franchises and tender game. 

When Sam's harmonious ear had learned the tune 

The Devil conveyed him back to Washington — 

A rural spot and national cemetery 

Where statesmen all good objects kill and bury, 

And where disease, infectious from the tomb, 

Springs perfect product of Congressional womb. 

To Sam he said. Behind this Capitol rise 

You can unrobe in safety from men's eyes, 



138 



And choose the colored suitings which you like. 
In Hell the garment workers never strike, 
And all you wish shall be delivered tonight. 
To undertake a picture of Sam's joy 
Would be inquisitive, enough to say 
The mission be accepted, and the pay. 

LXIII. 

The flag he wound about his tail, 

And over that a coat of mail. 

He straightened out the Devil's crook 

And made it like a sceptre look, 

Then put it down between his legs. 

As boys play horse with wooden pegs, 

And marched about and played a drum. 

With nose and fingers near his thumb — 

Tho, as the Devil, keen and mum. 

Upon his horns, an inch in size, 

He fastened cunning stars, as lies, 

While stripes, to leave none of the flag 

Unused, he put upon his nose, 

To represent the planet booze 

He was about to start upon 

As Satan new, and old Cheap John. 

His nose was red, his people white— 

With fear, — the world grew blue at s'ght 

Of one so devilishly raw 

And inexperienced. They cried 

With foresight semi-stupified: 

'The other Devil should at least 

Remain and tame this jungle beast. 

Before the world is given as ball 

To this inebriated bat.' 

A Devil that's played his tricks ad nauseam 

Is less to be feared than this cad bossy Sam. 

13^ 



LXIV. 

How Sam behaved himself and served his Maker, 

Became the most progressively aggressive fakir, 

Achieved distinction as a moral cannibal 

In search of little Romes to eat like Hannibal, 

The Devil's censorship of pen 

Forbids the story of to men, 

Preferring they shall simply feel it 

When time has gone for them to heal it. 

But I shall smuggle on the wires, 
At risk of hell's correction fires, 
A. brief report of Sam's first battle, 
And how he cultivated Philippine cattle. 
From this you can read further destiny 
And learn how Sam became a testy jay. 

LXV. 
There probably hasn't happened since the flood 
More democratic instance of duplicity. 
Than Satan Sam discovered he could do illicitly 
As a most artistic design in morals and blood. 
He laid a Filipino on his back 
And skid I love you, whack! 
He took an iron hammer that he had 
And struck the Filipino on his head. 
That kind of love, he softly said, 's divine: 
You shut your eyes and lo, you see the stars 
In naked costellations rain and shine. 
He shot the Filipino full of holes, 
And said, these apertures are for the light 
That streams from Congress through the howling 
night 



140 



Upon the furious world, to brighten up your souls. 

He cut the Filipino into bits, 

Of which he gave some to his dogs and some 

To politicians, and remarked, there'll come 

A day when you'll see through these counterfeits 

Of present pain, and aggregate your bones, 

In ecstacy that where a bone is lost 

A book will take its place, and as a tube 

Of hollow iron, hold the livid scars 

And remnants of your jelly body up. 

Said Sam, \o\ir scattered bones will some time 

stick 
If you cement them with our literature. 
Milton, par excellence, is certain cure 
For those who fancy slavery a bore. 
Read Areopagitica romantic. 
To learn how foolishly you have been frantic 
About the amputation of your head. 
Fool, don't you know the joy of being dead? 
'Most all good men that ever lived are dead. 

LXVI. 

Sam's tail, however, is the article 

That needs attention. It's a particle 

Discolored with some clots, but never mind. 

The next convention will a clean bill find. 

They call his tail Republican, for just 

The reason that they call last first. 

It is an instance where the tail 

Wags, not the dog, but wags the Devil. 

A partisan Republican's a chap 

Who left his conscience at Manassas Gap. 



141 



For Lincoln he hoorayed, and for the slave, 

But after laying Lincoln in the grave 

He fhought the progress of Creation finished, 

Sin dead, Amen, and Satan punished. 

O, what a resurrection day hosanna 

He sang, unconscious of the coming Hanna! 

Jeff Davis died and let his mantle fall, 

God save thee Mark, upon Jeff Davis Hanna. 

For Jeff — and mark I have no grudge agin him. 

The nation's parts are cooing loverly, 

And many parts are stewing blubberly; 

The gladsome slaves are having freedom's inning, 

Industrially happy all and grinning 

From gallows tree and cherry telegraph pole — 

For Jeff contented died — I say a 
Fact, that in the coming Mark, Isaiah, 
The prophet thundering after him he saw, 
Who should complete his work, and araw 
The nation unto him in slavery. 
For Davis is to Mark, as Baptist John 
To Jesus — or as prophet small to God. 
This Jeff desired only to enslave 
The nigger, while Mark, ambitiously, and bigger, 
Will put this frightened continent in shackles. 
Will treat his beggared countryman as nigger, 
And keep him in subjection to the trigger. 

LXVIL 

Speaking as Devil, I remark aside, 

J. Davis Mark was hell-heat tried 

By me, and tempered with professional pride 

To go above and throttle Freedom, and if 

His countrymen were conscious of his nature 



142 



They'd send him shooting back to me, a pleasure 

I carefully postpone a little longer. 

Until no Yankee men can say, I'm free. 

Hanna — the master of Sam's Satan-tail, 

The party once republican, now stale — 

Destined to bathe in America in blood 

Unless the people pitch him in the flood 

And ship him to infinity, is, I may state, 

The choicest of Hell's monuments to date. 

I made him all, one afternoon, myself, 

Out of a bag of sneaks and Judases; 

Of nearly all the thieves that ever lived 

I took the cream, and sprinkled in 

The dust of Caesar and Napoleon. 

When he was done they would not let him stay in' 
Hell, 

His hideousness made the baby devils yell. 

Until America had gone to proper rot 

I had to hang him out of hell, in copper pot. 

The stench of him was so ineffable 

I sealed him up with heat hermetical; 

But in America the sense of smelling 

Was quite catarrhally destroyed by sense of sell- 
ing. 

And no Republican, leastwise. 

At Marcus holds his nose or shies. 



143 



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